BioLite
Brooklyn — a camp stove that charges your phone off its own fire, and a business built so that campers in New York pay for cookstoves in Kenya.
Optimus
A Stockholm stove name from 1899, now one of the brands the Swiss Katadyn Group assembled — with a brass stove still in the catalog that predates most of its competitors' companies.
Optimus was founded in Stockholm in 1899 and is now part of the Katadyn Group, the Swiss house whose other brands cover water treatment and expedition food. The Svea — 550 grams of solid brass, white gas, no electronics — is still sold, which is unusual enough on its own. What the public record does not give is the date Optimus changed hands, so this page says that instead of guessing it.
- 1899Stockholm founding year, on the Katadyn Group's own Optimus page
- 550 gThe Svea's stated weight — brass, and it feels like it
- 7 minThe Svea's stated boil time for one liter, at 1400 W
What we'd reach for
- SveaWhite gas, self-pressurizing, solid brass, 550 grams, 1400 W, a stated 50 minutes of burn per fill. Katadyn calls it a stove that "continues to sell successfully after more than 70 years."
- The liquid-fuel and hybrid stovesKatadyn lists gas, liquid fuel and hybrid stoves as three separate families — the multi-fuel answer for trips where the canister supply chain is a hope rather than a plan.
- Cook systems, pots and cutleryThe accessory side of the same catalog. Useful, and the part where the brand's Swedish heritage tells you nothing about where the item was made.
Two Swedish names have been arguing about backpacking stoves for more than a century, and this site now has pages for both. Primus is one. Optimus is the other — founded in Stockholm in 1899, according to the company that owns it today, and still selling a brass stove that would be recognizable to a climber from the 1950s.
That owner is Swiss. Optimus belongs to the Katadyn Group, which lists it among the “targeted company acquisitions of highly specialized brands” that built the group’s portfolio — alongside Trek’n Eat, AlpineAire Foods, Pharmavoyage, Micropur, Certisil, Steripen and Spectra Watermakers. The group runs from Kemptthal (Zurich) with “approximately 200 people at its subsidiaries in Europe, Asia and the United States.”
The Svea, by the numbers
Most of the brand’s reputation sits in one object. The Optimus Svea is a self-pressurizing white gas stove in “nearly bulletproof solid brass,” and Katadyn publishes its figures without decoration: 550 g, 1400 W, 7 minutes to boil a liter, 50 minutes of burn time on average. The page calls it a stove that “continues to sell successfully after more than 70 years and has achieved cult status among outdoor enthusiasts.”
Seven minutes is slow. A modern integrated canister system does half a liter in about two — see Jetboil for that argument in full. What the Svea offers instead is a stove with no electronics, no plastic in the fuel path, no canister to source, and a service life measured in decades rather than seasons. It is a different bet about what goes wrong on a long trip.
The date nobody has published
Here is the gap, stated rather than papered over: Katadyn’s own pages do not say when Optimus joined the group, or who sold it. The about page lists Optimus among acquisitions with no year attached. The brand page gives 1899 and “more than a century” and stops. No seller, no transaction, no chronology.
That matters more than it sounds. A brand’s founding year tells you when the engineering tradition started; the acquisition date tells you when it stopped being run by the people who started it. For Optimus, the first number is published and the second is not, so this page carries the first and refuses the second. If a corporate record ever surfaces, it goes in.
Where they fall down
The corporate history is missing in public. For a brand whose entire pitch is longevity, a Swedish-to-Swiss ownership chain with no dates on it is thin. The same criticism this site makes of the Katadyn parent applies here with more force.
Swedish heritage is not a current origin claim. Nothing on the pages fetched states where any Optimus stove is manufactured today. A Stockholm founding date says nothing about the factory, and this page will not let the one imply the other.
No model-level certification is published where a buyer can find it. Gas and liquid-fuel appliances carry approvals; the product pages do not name them. That is a manual-and-label question, per stove, and the marketing does not substitute.
The Svea is slow, loud and a skill. Priming a self-pressurizing brass stove in the cold is a technique, not a feature. Buyers arriving from push-button canister systems should know that before, not after.
Liquid fuel is a commitment. Bottles, pumps, maintenance kits, spilled fuel, and airline rules — all real, all the price of the freedom liquid fuel buys.
Where Optimus fits
Cold and altitude. Liquid fuel keeps working where canister pressure sags.
Long trips and unreliable supply. White gas is available in more of the world than a specific canister thread is.
Buyers who service their own gear. A brass stove with a rebuild kit is a repairable object in a category full of sealed ones.
Not for: the two-minute coffee crowd, or anyone who wants their stove to have no opinions about fuel.
Why we rate them
The founding date is published and specific. 1899, Stockholm, on the owner’s own page — more precision than the parent group offers about itself.
The Svea’s spec sheet is unglamorous and complete. Weight, watts, boil time, burn time, all four together, none of them rounded into a slogan.
The gap is visible rather than hidden. A missing acquisition date is a better problem than a fabricated one, and it is the kind of thing that gets fixed once somebody asks.
When the fuel has to be whatever the last town had, we reach for Optimus.
More in Camp & carry
All brands →The nearest neighbors on the shelf — same categories first, same department after that.
Esbit
Hamburg, Germany — a family company founded in 1949, now run by the third generation, whose whole reputation rests on a wax-and-methenamine tablet that burns for twelve minutes.
Jetboil
The integrated canister cooking system — and the brand a public company kept when it decided to stop making tents.
Primus
Sweden, 1892 — the soot-free stove that lit a century of expeditions, now sharing a company with Silva and still assembling every burner itself.