Franke Management AG makes kitchen sinks, faucets, professional coffee machines, and commercial kitchen equipment - products that increasingly ship with embedded software, cloud connectivity, and smart-home integrations. Founded in 1911, the Swiss-headquartered manufacturer operates across five continents and more than 60 countries with a workforce of over 8,000. The threat surface is expanding: connected coffee systems, IoT-enabled foodservice equipment, and smart kitchen platforms all introduce attack vectors that didn't exist when the company was stamping stainless steel. Securing that perimeter means defending everything from device firmware and proprietary design data to global supply-chain logistics and customer-facing cloud services.
The company's technical domains - smart kitchen systems and coffee solutions - span embedded systems security, network infrastructure, and application-layer hardening across three distinct divisions: Home Solutions, Coffee Systems, and Foodservice Systems. A cybersecurity team here deals with industrial control environments, product security for networked appliances, and the corporate IT estate that ties a global operation together. The attack model is layered: OT on the factory floor, consumer IoT in millions of kitchens, and enterprise systems managing orders, R&D, and customer data across 60-plus jurisdictions with varying compliance regimes.
Franke is a fourth-generation family-run business with Swiss heritage emphasizing precision and quality. The company signals investment in new technologies and a culture of curiosity and collaboration. For security practitioners, the draw is a broad, technically diverse surface area - embedded, cloud, and enterprise - inside a manufacturing context that takes uptime and product integrity seriously. No hero narratives needed; the scope of the work speaks for itself.
