Defendant
2 cases as defendant.
Duke Manufacturing Co. ("Duke") is a privately held, family-owned manufacturer of commercial foodservice equipment founded in 1925 and headquartered at 2224 N. Tenth St., St. Louis, Missouri. It is not publicly traded and has no listed parent; the company describes itself as family owned and operated across roughly a century. Third-party business databases put headcount in the 500–1,000 range (Indeed/T homasNet) with revenue estimated between roughly $100M and $250M, though the company does not publish audited figures and these are estimates only.
Operations. Duke designs and builds commercial kitchen and foodservice equipment, with core lines in serving, production, holding, cooking, fabrication and merchandising. Product categories include stainless work tables and counters, serving and buffet systems, hot and cold food holding and display units, ovens, cabinets, convenience-store cabinetry and custom fabrication. The company operates domestic manufacturing in St. Louis and Sedalia, Missouri, plus a custom fabrication facility in Houston, and distribution centers in Sedalia, Prague (Czech Republic) and Shanghai. Customers are primarily QSR chains, c-stores, casual dining, K-12 school districts and institutional dining operators.
Litigation posture. Duke appears in the tracked data only as a defendant (0 plaintiff suits, 2 defendant entries), consistent with an operating company being sued by competitors rather than a patent assertion entity. Both tracked entries concern the same dispute: Marmon Foodservice Technologies, Inc. v. Duke Manufacturing Co., filed 2025-09-03 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri (E.D. Mo.) — Duke's home venue, not a plaintiff-friendly forum like the Eastern District of Texas.
Context. Marmon Foodservice Technologies is a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary (via Marmon Holdings) whose foodservice portfolio includes Cornelius, Prince Castle and Angelo Po. The Duke/Marmon case is the latest round in a long-running hot/cold/freeze food-holding equipment rivalry; an earlier matter, Low Temp Industries, Inc. v. Duke Manufacturing Co. (E.D. Mo., 2020), involved overlapping hot-cold-freeze well patents and related Duke IPR petitions. Duke has also filed PTAB petitions against Marmon patents. Merits of the pending case are not assessed here.
Sources: dukemfg.com; FERM; Crunchbase; PacerMonitor; PTAB/IPR records; Berkshire Hathaway/Marmon releases.
Patent infringement suit brought by Marmon Foodservice Technologies, Inc. against Duke Manufacturing Co. in the Eastern District of Missouri, tied to U.S. Patent No. 10,492,641 (Multi-zone food holding bin). The case is pending; the complaint was not retrieved, so the full list of asserted patents is not independently confirmed.
Patent-infringement action brought by Marmon Foodservice Technologies, Inc. against Duke Manufacturing Co. in the Eastern District of Missouri, filed in 2025 and pending with no reported disposition. The narrative links this case to US 9,980,322 via the patent record's litigation field, but notes that direct assertion of the '322 patent was not independently confirmed.