The Waterless Cooker was advertised as a utensil in which a complete meal could be prepared in one pot.
The lid of the cooker was fitted with clamps that prevented the escape of steam during cooking, making the addition of water unnecessary. Called the Waterless Cooker, this large pot with inset pans was stamped out of heavyweight aluminum and sold with a cast-iron base for cooking on a wood or coal stove. After the war West Bend introduced its line in department stores, but the market was dominated by two bigger companies.Ī new product emerged in 1921 at the suggestion of a West Bend salesman. During World War I, West Bend won a contract to produce army mess kits, but just as production began, the war ended. Most of the rest was sold to different jobbers under their brand names. Up through 1919 Sears purchased between 40 and 50 percent of the company's production. West Bend's anchor customer during these early years was Sears, Roebuck and Co., which until 1926 was wholly a mail-order firm. In 1920 sales passed the million-dollar market, reaching $1,598,562. Growth continued in the following years, and in 1918 a large three-story addition to the plant was completed. Also in that year, the company moved across the river to a new 14,000-square-foot plant on filled land. He immediately put into effect a perpetual inventory and cost system. Ziegler was named general manager of West Bend in 1914. The company first exhibited its products at a 1913 hardware association meeting in Milwaukee. The first items to bear the West Bend name were saucepans in four sizes, a frying pan, a pie pan, and a water dipper. Six to ten men were employed in the factory initially. A draw press capable of turning out about 15 kinds of utensils was ordered from Brooklyn, New York, and 3,000 pounds of aluminum from a firm in Pennsylvania. The founders rented an old button factory on the west bank of the Milwaukee River for $8.50 a month and three weeks later had a lathe, shaper, and drill press in place.
They immediately began work on the tools and dies needed by West Bend. The other two, Carl and Bob Wentorf, were skilled tool-and-die makers who had been working for an aluminum cookware company but had been threatened with dismissal because a third brother had left the firm to join another Wisconsin aluminum cookware company. Five of the seven founders were businessmen. Impressed by the growth of aluminum novelty and cookware companies in eastern Wisconsin, he recruited six other men who, with himself, each put down $1,000 to incorporate the West Bend Aluminum Co. Ziegler, a local entrepreneurial dynamo who had organized his own full-fledged fire-insurance company while still in high school, set out to find a substitute industry for the townspeople. When a pocketbook manufacturing company burned down in 1911, many residents of West Bend, Wisconsin, were thrown out of work. In the mid-1990s it ranked among the top five small-appliance manufacturers in the United States. Its appliances include breadmakers, electric skillets, slows cookers, woks, corn poppers, beverage makers, and electronic timers, primarily under the West Bend trademark. is a major manufacturer of small electric appliances, water-purification systems, and high-quality stainless-steel cookware. SICs: 3634 Electric Housewares and Fans 3914 Silverware, Plated Ware and Stainless Steel Ware Incorporated: 1911 as the West Bend Aluminum Co. Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Premark International, Inc.
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