Voestalpine : Colorful and efficient cooling panels thanks to colofer®

Few people are familiar with the insulation specialist Brucha, but everyone is familiar the company's color sandwich panels. voestalpine supplies the colofer® color-coated steel sheets for the panels.

When you visit a supermarket that has a colorful metal facade and when a deli employee gets you what you want from the cold room, then the probability is pretty high that the refrigeration panels inside and the facade elements outside both come from the family-owned company Brucha. A classic hidden champion who has remained unknown to the general public even though its products are seen everywhere-not only in Europe, but also in Southeast Asia, New Zealand, and the USA.

A hidden champion who has remained unknown even though its products are seen everywhere: Brucha.

Success according to the sandwich principle

Silvia Brozek from the voestalpine Steel & Service Center is one of the insiders who knows about the success story of Brucha in Michelhausen, Lower Austria: 'It all started small in 1948, when Josef Brucha passed the master craftsman's exam for insulation technicians. Today, Brucha employs people from the entire region.' Thirty years after the company was founded, Josef Brucha came up with the idea of packing insulation material between two panels. That was the birth of the insulated sandwich panel that made Brucha really big. Another 40 years later in 2018, the 'Evolution' fast-build panel for cold rooms was born. The panel's outer shell is made of colofer®, the color-coated steel strip that voestalpine has been producing since the 1980s-making voestalpine one of Austria's biggest consumers of paint.

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Direct line Linz-Michelhausen

voestalpine produces around 220,000 tons of color-coated steel strip annually, and Brucha processes close to 8,000 of those tons. 'This is mainly a project business,' says Silvia Brozek. As Senior Sales Manager for the House Industry, she is part of a joint team together with customer service and technical colofer® service and she is always there for Brucha: 'Not a day goes by without us talking on the phone,' comments Brozek on her daily work, 'often about specific colofer® shades that Brucha needs, for example, for customers who want a metal facade in their corporate colors.'

Simply exemplary

Just as often, communication between Linz and Michelhausen is about color samples. Brozek explains: 'We offer coatings in all RAL colors. If the desired shade is not in the RAL palette, we make every effort to find an individual color solution.' At least once a year, the teams from Brucha and voestalpine meet in person. Brozek values the meetings with Brucha and enjoys the collaboration overall: 'We inspire each other. Brucha is always asking us to come up with new solutions . And we keep Brucha punctually informed about our new developments so they can offer them in their customer network.' Being able to mutually rely on each other is part of our joint success. And as Brozek knows, this reliability also extends to the quality: 'We give Brucha extensive guarantees on colofer®-and are pleased to report that the complaint rate is close to zero.'