HOUSTON – Grundfos has announced the company is celebrating the 50th anniversary of U.S. operations. The nearly 80-year-old Danish company began U.S. operations in 1973 and now has 13 offices and manufacturing facilities and employs nearly 1,700 employees.
In 1944, founder Poul Due Jensen began Grundfos out of his basement in Denmark. When Jensen couldn’t find a quality electric pump for a client’s small automatic waterworks project, he developed his own. The company quickly expanded across Europe and other countries with the goal of opening sales and production operations in the U.S. In 1973, Einar Cook, a Danish-American from Fresno, California, visited the Grundfos office in Denmark and was amazed at the quality of the deep well turbine pumps and returned to the U.S. to use them on his farm. Cook then imported a few pumps to sell in his farm equipment dealership and the U.S. business was born.