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Nolte Küchen trusts in Jowat’s reliable adhesive solutions, especially when it comes to edgebanding.

Nolte Küchen trusts in Jowat’s reliable adhesive solutions, especially when it comes to edgebanding.

Nolte Küchen GmbH & Co. KG is one of Germany’s most successful kitchen manufacturers. Local innovation and high quality are the guiding principles of the company with a long history from Löhne, in Germany’s Ostwestfalen-Lippe region. As such, it’s no surprise that they chose Jowat, an enterprise based just 30 kilometers away in Detmold, as their adhesives partner—at least you wouldn’t think so. In fact, the close and successful partnership the two businesses enjoy today is the result of a very gradual process.

Today, Nolte Küchen and Jowat SE can look back on a long history of cooperation as partners—perhaps even friends. It all began in the 1980s when the kitchen manufacturer procured its first products from Jowat—the Jowacoll® 110.00 assembly adhesive, an adapted Jowatherm® 288.xx series EVA hot melt adhesive for edgebanding, and a plastics adhesive for small repairs. Wolfgang Rasser, who handled all our dealings with Nolte at the time, was given the opportunity to demonstrate his expertise and the quality of our adhesives many times over the years. “At first though, it was always just little questions to do with their bonding processes,” he stresses. “But the scale and complexity of the enquiries increased as time went on.”

Things finally got serious in 1990, with what would become an absolute sensation within the industry. Nolte was planning to switch its adhesive to a polyolefin-based (PO) product supplied by Jowat: the Jowat-Hightherm® 227.01 (listed at the time under the name EP 603553). “Nolte was possibly one of the first manufacturers in the world to use PO for edgebanding,” Wolfgang Rasser muses in retrospect. The first trial run was conducted at the customer’s site in 1991. When put to the test on a double-sided IMA edge laminating machine, the PO hot melt adhesive outshone the product Nolte had previously been using. The changeover was given the green light after an independent LGA test confirmed that the Jowat-Hightherm® 227.01 was the better adhesive for the application in question.

A Fast Response Meets Great Dedication

The next contract was soon to follow, as the customer asked Wolfgang Rasser to oversee the switch from several products to Jowat alternatives at once. He still recalls today how much of a mammoth task this was: “I spent several days at Nolte Küchen during that period.” Thanks to the close cooperation between the kitchen manufacturer and the adhesive expert, the changeover was a complete success. Whenever the customer expressed any doubts regarding the adhesive’s performance, Jowat’s Support team was always on hand to clear things up. This level of service played a significant role in strengthening the business relationship. “The fast response times and great dedication demonstrated by our contacts really increased our trust in Jowat adhesives,” recalls Hans Flügel of Nolte Küchen’s Development and Design department. On the basis of this trust, more and more orders came in from Nolte—including one for a batch of Jowacoll® dispersion adhesive delivered in small bottles that would be easy to transport and use for onsite kitchen installation for Nolte’s customers. Nolte now also uses Jowat adhesives for the automated bonding of handle strips—the colorless PUR hot melt adhesive Jowatherm-Reaktant® 608.00 and the Jowacoll® 114.80 adhesive, to be precise. Nolte and Jowat are also embarking on new endeavors together. Following the conversion of a single-sided Homag system at Nolte’s Löhne site in 2015, the kitchen manufacturer became one of the first companies to process the PUR hot melt adhesive Jowatherm-Reaktant® MR 607.90 with hazard-free labelling.

Unwaning Enthusiasm and Interest

Both enterprises value the long-standing business relationship—which has since grown to become more of a friendship—and work tirelessly to keep it healthy. “Nolte representatives like Hans Flügel have always been enthusiastic participants in the Jowat Symposium,” says Wolfgang Rasser, emphasizing the kitchen manufacturer’s loyalty. The business relationship between Nolte and Jowat has now been passed on to the next generation: Daniel Hass has stepped into Wolfgang Rasser’s shoes as our Nolte Küchen liaison, while Head of Purchasing Johannes Heitmann is now the key man in maintaining the good partnership with the adhesive experts on the Nolte side of things. “We look forward to seeing what joint projects 2022 and the years beyond will bring,” says Heitmann, looking to the future.