A company with tradition
Our company history
The KISSING company was founded in 1850 by HEINRICH KISSING.
Even at a young age, Heinrich Kissing enjoyed international recognition for his unusual engraving skills, for which he was honoured in the state capital of Düsseldorf in 1880. The young and creative engraver had become the originator of a new process for re-embossing cast Christ bodies.
He and his son Franz specialised in the production of corpuses and religious symbols of faith, also known at the time as ‘devotional objects’. The entire product range was presented for the first time at the Paris World Exhibition in 1878, laying the foundations for a prosperous development.
Franz Kissing built an imposing company building in 1900, in which around two hundred employees were working on the production of religious devotional objects and host baking systems at the turn of the century.
Host Baking Equipment
The first host baking plates were also produced as early as 1860.
Cast iron plates were provided with the finest engravings to enable the baking of lay and priest hosts with different motifs.
Many countries later ordered not only the finely engraved host baking plates, but also complete baking machines that were suitable for both open fires and electric operation. Many of the KISSING baking machines built a hundred years ago are still in use around the world thanks to their solid construction.
Even today, both simple and highly technical host baking machines from KISSING are exported to over 130 countries around the world.
From the company founder to the fifth generation
Around fifty years ago, the KISSING family business also began producing embossed medals and decorations for athletes and carnival organisers.
In 1994, the two brothers Franz (*1923 + 2013) and Adalbert Kissing (*1929 + 2003), who had run the company since 1950, handed it over to Uta Kissing, Adalbert Kissing’s youngest daughter, who was only twenty-eight years old at the time.
For the first time in the fifth generation, a woman is now managing the traditional Menden company. Under her leadership, investments were made in modern machinery, among other things: An embossing press with a pressure capacity of 1,000 tonnes and a high-speed coin press were purchased.
The electroplating shop was equipped with a modern wastewater system. This was followed by the purchase of a modern laser engraving machine for the rapid realisation of embossing stamps and signatures.
Kissing GmbH