The history
11,000 years from a stone rubbed on a stone to the three-jar mixie whirring in nearly every Indian kitchen.
For thousands of years, grinding grain, spices and batter meant hours of hard work at a stone, most often done by women. Then small, fast electric motors arrived, and inventors in America and Europe put spinning blades at the bottom of a jar to make drink mixers, blenders and food processors. Those machines struggled with tough Indian grinding, so in 1963 an engineer in Mumbai built a stronger one, the mixie, and Indian companies spent the next sixty years making it tougher, safer and cheaper.
c. 9000 BCE
Oldest known quern
Abu Hureyra, Syria
c. 500 BCE
Rotary hand quern
North-east Iberian Peninsula (today Spain)
1905
High-speed fractional horsepower motor
Chester Beach, USA
filed 1922
Blender patent (motor in base, jar on top)
Stephen J. Poplawski, USA
1955
Electric wet grinder
P. Sabapathy, Coimbatore, India
1963
Indian mixer grinder brand
Sumeet, S. P. and Madhuri Mathur, Mumbai
1967
Indian standard for food mixers (IS 4250)
Indian Standards Institution
1971
Compact home food processor
Magimix, Robert Comte, France
9000 BCE – 1955
People grind by hand: a stone rubbed on a stone, then a stone turned on a stone. In India the sil-batta, the ammikkal and the aattukkal do the work, and it takes hours.
9000 BCE
c. 9000 BCE
The oldest quern found so far comes from Abu Hureyra in Syria, from about 9000 BCE. It is a saddle quern: a flat or slightly hollow bottom stone and a smaller stone that you push back and forth. Grain caught between them is crushed into flour.
Why it mattered. Crushing food between two hard surfaces is the oldest grinding idea, and a mixer grinder still crushes food, only much faster.
2500 BCE
c. 2500 BCE
Grinding stones from the Indus Valley civilisation, around 2500 BCE, look a lot like the sil-batta still found in Indian homes: a flat stone (the sil) and a rolling stone (the batta). It has many names, like shil nora in Bengali, pata-varvanta in Marathi and ammi in Tamil. For thousands of years it ground chutneys, spice pastes and soaked lentils.
Why it mattered. The mixie was built to do the sil-batta's job, which is why Indian cooks expect so much from it.
500 BCE
c. 500 BCE
Some of the oldest rotary querns found so far come from north-east Spain, from around 500 BCE. The top stone turns round and round on the bottom one with a handle, instead of being pushed back and forth. Rotary querns reached Britain by about 400 to 300 BCE.
Why it mattered. Turning in a circle is faster and less tiring than pushing, and every mixer since has used rotation.
1900
Until the 1950s and beyond
South Indian kitchens had two big stones. The flat ammikkal ground masala pastes, and the aattukkal, a heavy stone with a hollow and a round stone turned inside it, made idli and dosa batter from soaked rice and urad dal. Making batter meant soaking grains overnight and then grinding by hand for a long time, work that fell mostly on women.
Why it mattered. Slow stone grinding became the standard every electric grinder has been judged against.
1850 – 1935
Hand-cranked beaters, then tiny high-speed electric motors, turn spindles in soda fountains and bakeries. The kind of motor that will one day power the mixie is born.
1856
Collier, a tinsmith, patented a mixer with rotating parts. Within a few years inventors were selling hand-cranked rotary egg beaters, where gears turn a slow crank into fast-spinning beaters.
Why it mattered. Gears showed that a slow hand could make a whisk spin fast, the same trade of force for speed a motor makes.
1885
Rufus Eastman is thought to have invented the first mixer driven by an electric motor. Few homes had electricity yet, so electric mixing stayed rare for decades.
Why it mattered. It swapped the tired human arm for a motor, the step every electric kitchen machine depends on.
1905
Electric motors of the time were big and heavy. Beach invented a small, high-speed ‘fractional horsepower’ motor that could run on the electricity coming into homes. Hamilton Beach called it a ‘universal’ motor: its magnet coils and spinning coils are wired in a chain, so it runs on AC or DC, starts with a strong twist and spins very fast.
Why it mattered. Most mixer grinders still use a universal motor, which can spin at around 20,000 turns a minute.
1910
1910 to 1911
Fred Osius set up the Hamilton Beach Manufacturing Company, named after two of his workers. One of its first products was a milkshake mixer: Beach's fast motor spun a spindle with a small agitator dipped into a cup. It was sold to drugstore soda fountains, and the same kind of spindle mixer is still used today.
Why it mattered. It proved that a small, fast motor could whip food in seconds.
1919
Johnston, a Hobart engineer, invented an electric stand mixer, and by 1915 his 20-gallon model was standard in big bakeries. In 1919 Hobart brought out a version for homes, the KitchenAid Food Preparer.
Why it mattered. Electric mixing moved from factories into family kitchens.
1922 – 1985
A motor in the base, a jar on top, blades at the bottom: the blender and then the food processor spread through kitchens in America and Europe.
1922
Filed 1922, granted 1924
Poplawski filed a patent for a ‘beverage mixer’ on 18 February 1922, and it was granted on 15 January 1924 as US patent 1,480,914. A motor sat inside a stand, and a drinks container with a spinning agitator at its bottom sat on top. Putting the container on the stand switched the motor on and joined the two shafts together.
Why it mattered. Motor below, jar on top, blades at the bottom: this is still the shape of every blender and mixer grinder.
1937
1937 to 1938
Fred Osius, the Hamilton Beach founder, designed a better blender, and the bandleader Fred Waring put $25,000 into it. The ‘Miracle Mixer’ was shown at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago for $29.75, and in 1938 it was renamed the Waring Blendor. Also in 1937, W. G. Barnard's company, later Vitamix, began selling its own blender.
Why it mattered. The blender became a famous kitchen machine, and its jar-and-blade design spread around the world.
1950
Early 1950s
The German radio maker Braun moved into kitchen machines with the Multimix blender in the early 1950s, and in 1957 it launched the KM 3 kitchen machine. Braun blenders made their way into some Indian homes too.
Why it mattered. A Braun blender that could not cope with Indian grinding is where India's own mixie began.
1954
In 1954 the millionth Waring Blendor was sold. Blenders also went to work in laboratories, and Jonas Salk used one while developing his polio vaccine.
Why it mattered. Fast blades turned out to be useful for science as well as for milkshakes.
1963
1961 to 1963
Robot-Coupe says it has made kitchen machines in France since 1961. According to Magimix, Pierre Verdun and his friend Robert Comte built a machine with a blade at the bottom of a bowl that could chop, grind, shred and knead, and launched it for professional chefs in 1963.
Why it mattered. It turned the blender into the food processor, one machine for many chopping jobs.
1971
1 March 1971
According to Magimix, Robert Comte's wife wanted a smaller version of the chefs' machine for her own kitchen. Comte made one, and the first compact home food processor, the Magimix, was born on 1 March 1971. It reached shops in Britain in 1974.
Why it mattered. The food processor moved from restaurant kitchens into homes.
1973
January 1973
Sontheimer, an engineer who loved French cooking, set up Cuisinart in 1971 and reworked a Robot-Coupe and Magimix machine for American kitchens. He showed it at a trade show in Chicago in January 1973. With help from the chef James Beard it sold well, reaching 290,000 units by 1980.
Why it mattered. In America, ‘Cuisinart’ came to mean any food processor.
1955 – 2000
Indian inventors build machines for Indian food: the electric wet grinder for idli batter and the mixer grinder for chutneys, masalas and pastes. Sumeet, Preethi and others become household names.
1955
Sabapathy, a young apprentice in a Coimbatore workshop, built a wet grinder: granite stones turned by an electric motor inside a drum. It did the aattukkal's job of grinding rice and dal into idli and dosa batter. From 1963 P. B. Krishnamurthy's Lakshmi Grinders made them popular, and in 1975 R. Doraiswamy invented the tilting wet grinder.
Why it mattered. It saved many women hours of grinding and started a whole industry in Coimbatore.
1963
Madhuri Mathur's German Braun blender overheated on Indian grinding, and she asked her husband, a Siemens engineer, to fix it. Instead he designed a new mixie with a much stronger motor, and in 1963 set up a company, Power Control and Appliances, to make it, starting at about 8 mixies a month. He did the engineering, she gave the cook's view, and they called it Sumeet, Sanskrit for ‘good friend’.
Why it mattered. It was India's first mixer grinder built for chutneys, masalas and batters, and ‘mixie’ became an Indian word.
1967
India published IS 4250, its standard for domestic electric food mixers (liquidizers and grinders), in 1967 and revised it in 1980. It checks that a mixer does not get too hot, does not give shocks and survives 96 hours of running. One of its tests is very Indian: the mixer must grind rice and black gram into idli batter.
Why it mattered. It gave buyers a way to trust a mixer, through the ISI mark.
1977
1970s to 1980
In 1970 the Sumeet trademark was registered with Madhuri Mathur as its owner, and in the 1970s Sumeet designed one jar that could dry grind, wet grind and liquidise. A price cut from Rs 960 to Rs 740 helped monthly sales jump from about 2,000 to about 17,000 in 1976 to 1977. By 1980 it made 50,000 mixies a month and had opened a motor factory in Madras.
Why it mattered. The mixie stopped being a rare luxury and became something middle-class families saved up for.
1978
Maya Appliances started the Preethi brand in Chennai in 1978. It became a favourite mixer grinder of the South, and in 2011 the company said it had nearly 80% of the mixer grinder market in Tamil Nadu and 45% in South India.
Why it mattered. It showed how much Indian cooks trusted a machine made nearby for their own food.
1989
October 1989
Gandhimathi Appliances, set up in 1986, first made LPG stoves and water heaters and began making Butterfly mixer grinders in October 1989. More and more Indian brands joined in, so buyers had plenty of choice.
Why it mattered. Competition pushed prices down and put a mixie within reach of many more homes.
1995
Mid-1990s
In the mid-1990s Sumeet could make 100,000 mixies a month, and about 30 of every 100 mixers sold in India were Sumeets. Then family disputes over the trademark went to the courts, and new competitors arrived after India opened its economy. The brand faded, though the family later tried to revive it.
Why it mattered. The name that invented the Indian mixie lost the market it created.
2000 – today
Big companies buy the old brands, a state hands out free mixies, the ISI mark becomes compulsory, and new brushless motors arrive.
2006
February 2006
IS 4250 first covered mixers of up to 600 watts. Amendment No. 9, in February 2006, raised the limit to 750 watts. Today most Indian mixer grinders sit between 500 and 750 watts.
Why it mattered. More power helps the motor keep spinning through hard spices and thick batter without slowing down.
2006
March 2006
Tamil Nadu applied in 2005, and the ‘Coimbatore Wet Grinder’ became a registered geographical indication from March 2006, like Darjeeling tea. In 2015 more than 700 makers in the area turned out about 75,000 wet grinders a month.
Why it mattered. The city where Sabapathy built the first wet grinder became famous for them.
2011
January 2011
The Dutch company Philips agreed in January 2011 to buy Preethi, which had about 850 workers. Philips said the deal made it the clear leader in a fast-growing part of India's kitchen appliance market.
Why it mattered. Global companies now wanted the Indian mixer grinder, a product invented for India.
2011
16 September 2011
Tamil Nadu began giving a free mixer grinder, wet grinder and table fan to families that draw rice from ration shops, aimed at the women who run the kitchen. The first year was meant to cover 25 lakh (2.5 million) families, and by early 2014 about 80 lakh women had received the set.
Why it mattered. It shows the mixie had become an everyday need, not a luxury.
2019
1 May 2019
Under the Kitchen Appliances (Quality Control) Order, 2018, food mixers, hand blenders and juicers sold in India had to carry the ISI mark from 1 May 2019. Mixers must pass the tests of IS 4250, including the checks for electric shock, overheating and moving parts.
Why it mattered. Unsafe or badly made mixers could no longer be sold legally, even if they were cheap.
2022
In February 2022 Atomberg launched a mixer grinder with a brushless (BLDC) motor, which it called India's first mixer grinder with an inverter motor, with speeds from about 2,000 to 20,000 turns a minute. In March 2022 Crompton bought a controlling stake in Butterfly.
Why it mattered. The old universal motor, whose carbon brushes wear out, finally has a challenger.
Did you know?
India's official test for mixers includes a very Indian job: grinding rice and black gram into idli batter.
The Indian mixer standard first allowed motors of up to 600 watts, then raised the limit to 750 watts in 2006.
Sumeet means ‘good friend’ in Sanskrit, and the brand began with about 8 mixies a month in 1963.
The same man, Fred Osius, founded Hamilton Beach and later designed the blender that became the Waring Blendor.
In 2015 the Coimbatore area had more than 700 wet grinder makers turning out about 75,000 grinders a month.
The people
1880 – 1934 · Inventor and mechanic · USA
Built the small, fast motor that made kitchen machines possible.
Active 1910s – 1930s · Inventor and businessman · USA
Founded Hamilton Beach, then designed the blender that became the Waring Blendor.
1885 – 1956 · Inventor · USA
Patented the drinks mixer with the motor in the base and the agitator at the bottom of the jar.
1900 – 1984 · Bandleader and backer · USA
Put his money and his name behind the Waring Blendor.
20th century · Inventor · India
Built the first electric wet grinder in Coimbatore in 1955.
1930 – 2009 · Engineer and founder of Sumeet · India
Designed a mixie strong enough for Indian grinding.
1933 – 2016 · Co-founder of Sumeet · India
Asked for a mixie that would not break, gave the cook's view, and owned the Sumeet trademark.
1914 – 1998 · Engineer and founder of Cuisinart · USA
Brought the French food processor to American kitchens.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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