We went to Würzburg hoping to hear our name. We came home as a Finalist of the Großer Preis des Mittelstandes 2026. But perhaps the most meaningful part was discovering what others saw in the company we have been busy building.
There are moments when running a business forces you to look forward: the next product, the next project, the next market, the next problem that needs solving. Then there are rare moments that make you look back and Saturday night in Würzburg was one of them.
livecookintable® was named a Hessen Finalist in the Großer Preis des Mittelstandes 2026.
It is an honour we are immensely proud of. But what stayed with us after the ceremony was not only the title, but the jury’s explanation of why we received it. Because seen from the outside, the story of livecookintable looks slightly different from the one we experience every day from our offices among the vineyards of Eltville.
“Not a product, but a principle”
Those are the words the jury used to begin its assessment of livecookintable® and they get remarkably close to what we have spent years trying to build.
A table is ultimately just a table. A cooking module is a piece of equipment. What becomes interesting is what happens when the infrastructure stops dictating the experience. A breakfast area can become a bar later in the day. A conference space can become a live kitchen. A cooking station can move to where guests actually are rather than asking the entire operation to work around a fixed kitchen.
The jury highlighted this ability to create professional cooking stations, breakfast buffets, coffee or pool bars, Grab’n’Go points and grill stations from a flexible system of tables and modules.
In its assessment, the underlying idea is to free gastronomy from fixed walls, allowing the same elements to be reconfigured for different concepts and occasions.
That freedom has always been more important to us than the object itself and it comes from understanding that our clients require flexibility because hospitality has changed. Spaces and teams need to do more, concepts change throughout the day and guests still expect the result to feel effortless. Our job is to make the difficult part happen behind the experience.
A small company that decided to think bigger
The second part of the jury’s assessment made us pause. It described livecookintable’s development from a technically focused niche provider with limited reach, into an international system provider.
Of course that transformation did not happen overnight or without setbacks. When the pandemic brought hospitality almost to a standstill, it could easily have become a period of retreat. Instead, we used that time to invest in product development, digitalisation and international market development. The jury specifically highlighted that decision as part of the company’s transformation.
One example came from Dubai.
During the pandemic, an international hotel needed to find new uses for closed banquet spaces. Flexible live-cooking systems allowed those areas to become live culinary spaces. Later, the same systems could be used elsewhere in the property, including the lobby and rooftop terrace, without requiring permanent conversion.
It is a relatively simple example, but it captures the idea behind livecookintable® perfectly.
Don’t build the hospitality experience around the infrastructure. Build infrastructure that can follow the hospitality experience.
Today, we are active across Europe, North America, the Arab region, Asia and Australia, with showrooms stretching from Eltville to New York, Dallas, Florida, Dubai and Melbourne. That is quite a distance for an idea that still calls the Rheingau home.
Technology behind the experience, not instead of it
There is another contradiction at the heart of livecookintable® that we have been thinking about a lot lately.
We believe strongly in both human hospitality as well as in technology. Behind livecookintable® today is a business that has become considerably more digital. The jury highlighted MEC2’s integrated ERP and international CRM systems, digital workflows, extensive use of AI across administration, development, marketing and service, and the application of 3D data and AI-supported rendering to visualise individual solutions in a customer’s own environment.
These tools make us faster. But speed isn’t the end goal. If AI can shorten the path between an idea and a visualisation, our teams have more time to discuss what the client actually needs. If better engineering makes a cooking system less dependent on its physical surroundings, an operator has more freedom to decide where the guest experience should happen.
Technology works best when the person using it gains more possibilities, not less relevance.
Growth that includes the people behind it
The jury’s assessment did not stop with technology or international reach, but focused at the people behind the company too. It highlighted systematic training, cross-functional development, international assignments and a culture in which ideas can move quickly from employees into the organisation.
That matters to us because growth is easy to describe in numbers. Since 2022, our revenue has increased fivefold. Our team has grown to around 25 people. We have built our own internal design and engineering capabilities and created new roles as the business has expanded.
But numbers tell only one part of the story.
Growth can also be someone entering the company in one role, expressing an ambition to do something completely different, and being given the opportunity to work towards it. It can be designers and engineers who today take an idea from its first sketch through to a production drawing. Or someone becoming more capable because technology has taken repetitive work away rather than taking their job away. Those things are harder to capture on a balance sheet, but they are also part of the company being built.
Eltville started this
Perhaps the most meaningful part; there is one detail about this Finalist recognition that makes the story particularly special for us. We did not nominate ourelves. The company was nominated for the first time in 2026 by the City of Eltville.
Today, livecookintable® operates internationally, but our roots remain in Eltville, which makes being nominated by our own city particularly meaningful.
What being a Finalist means to us
Becoming a Finalist doesn’t mean we have figured everything out. But it does mean that people outside MEC2 looked closely at what we have built and decided that the whole story was worth recognising: our products, our people, the decisions we made along the way and the ambition to keep growing internationally without losing sight of where we started.
That is something we are incredibly grateful for, and something we’ll allow ourselves a moment to celebrate.
To our team, our clients and partners, and to the City of Eltville, which put our name forward in the first place: thank you for being part of the journey.
From Eltville to Würzburg, and from the Rheingau to hospitality spaces around the world, it has already taken us somewhere we are very proud to be.
And we’re still building.
Whether you would like to learn more about our products, request a personalized consultation, or are simply curious about the solutions we can develop for you: we are here for you.
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