voestalpine x BRUCHA - years of partnership at eye level!

Few people know the insulation specialist Brucha, but everyone knows its tinted sandwich panels. The colorful colofer® steel sheet for them is supplied by voestalpine.

If your shopping trip takes you to a supermarket with a colorful metal facade, where the delicatessen employee is fetching supplies of what you want from the cold storage room: then the probability is quite high that both the refrigeration panels inside and the facade elements outside come from the family-owned company Brucha. A classic hidden champion that has remained unknown to the general public - even though its products are ubiquitous. Not only in Europe, but also in Southeast Asia, New Zealand and the USA.

A hidden champion that has remained unknown: cooling panels and facade elements from Brucha

Success according to sandwich principle

Silvia Brozek from the voestalpine Steel & Service Center is one of the insiders who knows about the success story of Brucha from Michelhausen in Lower Austria: "It all started small in 1948, when Josef Brucha took the master craftsman's examination for the insulation trade. Today, Brucha employs 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 sandwich panel with insulation effect, with which Brucha became really big. Another 40 years later, 2018 saw the birth of the "Evolution" rapid construction panel specifically for cold rooms. With an outer shell made of colofer®, the colorfully coated steel strip that voestalpine has been producing since the 1980s - making it one of Austria's biggest consumers of paint.

Direct line Linz-Michelhausen

Voestalpine produces around 220,000 tons of colorful steel strip annually, and Brucha processes around 8,000 tons of that. "By and large, this is a project business," says Silvia Brozek. As Senior Sales Manager for House Industry, she is there for Brucha as part of a joint team with customer service and technical colofer® service. Permanently: "Not a day goes by without us talking on the phone," Brozek reports from her daily work, "often it's about selected colofer® shades that Brucha needs, for example, for customers who want a metal facade in their corporate colors."

Simply exemplary

Accordingly, communication between Linz and Michelhausen often involves color samples, explains Brozek: "We offer coatings in all colors of the RAL palette. If the desired shade can't be found there, 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 as she enjoys the collaboration overall: "We inspire each other: by Brucha always wanting new solutions from us. And vice versa, by introducing Brucha to our new developments in real time so they can offer them in their customer network." Being able to mutually rely on each other is part of the joint success. The reliability also extends to quality, Brozek knows: "We give Brucha extensive guarantees on colofer® - and are pleased that the complaint rate is close to zero."

Source: https://www.voestalpine.com/blog/de/innovation/bunte-und-effiziente-kuehlpaneele-dank-colofer/