About us

How it all started

Karel and Pavel have been providing (and servicing) lyophilizers to Czech and Slovak laboratories for over 10 years. Seeing the growing demand for lyophilizers in the food processing business, they tried to convince their existing suppliers and new ones as well that a market existed for equipment with a capacity of a few kilograms that doesn’t cost a fortune.

When no one wanted to make an affordable device for small businesses, they started their own company and invited Jan to join them. Partly because he’s an electrical engineer, and partly because three heads are better than two (and more hands get more done). We set up in two basement rooms of an apartment building in Prague 6 and got to work.

It took us two years to develop our own lyophilizer. Karel and Pavel knew what did and didn’t work in dozens of laboratories, but perfecting their new machine still took hundreds of hours of research, brainstorming, negotiating, testing and trials. The testing phase began in summer 2017, when the Brno testing institute issued the certification needed to put the product on the market.

In the end we managed to make a fully functional lyophilizer that is not only entirely automatic, i.e. does not require users to enter a large number of parameters or have a detailed understanding of the process, but also composed primarily of Czech parts, with just a few from elsewhere in the EU or the USA. And so AMARU was born.

Where did the name AMARU come from? Túpac Amaru was the last ruler of the Incan Empire and according to some sources the Incas were the first to freeze-dry their food. Túpac Amaru was later killed by Spanish colonizers, but his name became a symbol of resistance to oppression in Peru. AMARU is also easy to pronounce in different languages.

Broken vacuum chamber for AMARU freeze dryer

Another way not to make a vacuum chamber

The year after getting our certificates we found the first pioneers wanting to start making their own lyophilized foods instead of importing.

Growing sales meant that we could improve our workshop equipment in late 2018. A new drill and miter saw for working with metal, 3D printer for continued development of AMARU and making small series of plastic parts all helped AMARU keep improving and especially speed up the drying process. In the vast majority of cases we were able to offer new developments to our existing customers as well, improving their efficiency.

Investing back into development, testing and trials of new possibilities paid off: In 2019 we presented a completely reworked shelfing system at the trade fair For Gastro & Hotel that sped up the drying process by up to 33%. Perhaps that was why we won 1st place in Technology and Equipment at the GRAND PRIX in Prague.

In 2020 we worked with a Czech supplier to develop a new cooling unit that met the EU regulations for F-gases and also managed to improve cooling performance, cutting drying time by another approx. 15%. We were also able to hire a company and graphic designer to design new firmware for our lyophilizers.