A woollen-mill salesman, the end of Prohibition and a village workshop.

Amana takes its name from a place and a community. The Amana Colonies in eastern Iowa were settled by a communal religious society, and English Wikipedia says the appliance business emerged from the reorganisation that community went through in the early 1930s. Its founder, George C. Foerstner, was a travelling salesman for the Amana woollen mill. According to The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa (University of Iowa Press, 2009), as cited by English Wikipedia, he saw that the 1933 repeal of Prohibition would create demand for beverage coolers and started the Electrical Equipment Co. in 1934 in Middle Amana, Iowa, to build commercial walk-in coolers.

The colony soon took the business in. English Wikipedia says the company was sold to the Amana Society in 1936 and renamed the Electrical Department of the Amana Society, with Foerstner staying on as manager, and that its goods were produced in the Middle Amana woollen mill. The brand’s own history page gives the same starting point: Amana, it says, was founded by George Foerstner in Middle Amana, Iowa, in 1934.

Around 1950, English Wikipedia says, the Amana Society sold the Electrical Department to an investment group organised by Foerstner, and the company was renamed Amana Refrigeration, Inc. It made refrigerators and then air conditioners. The company’s timeline dates its DeepFreeze upright freezer for the home to 1947 and its side-by-side refrigerator to 1949, and lists a bottom-freezer refrigerator in 1957.

Radar, heating and a string of owners.

The defining product came through a new owner. English Wikipedia says Amana was acquired in 1965 by Raytheon, the defence electronics company that had developed microwave cooking and sold a commercial Radarange model in the 1950s. Two years later the name reached the kitchen counter: the Amana brand history lists 1967 as the year it brought the Radarange consumer microwave to market.

Raytheon left the appliance business in the 1990s. The New York Times reported on 15 July 1997 that Raytheon was selling its appliance operations, the predecessor of today’s Amana business, to Goodman, a heating-and-cooling manufacturer. Goodman did not keep both halves. In June 2001, the Chicago Tribune reported that Maytag would buy Amana Appliances, and on 14 July 2001 The New York Times reported that Maytag had received approval for the purchase. English Wikipedia says Goodman separated the appliance business from its heating-and-cooling business and kept the latter, so the Amana name has since appeared on two different sets of products.

Ownership then moved again on each side. Whirlpool Corporation acquired Maytag in 2006, bringing Amana appliances with it, and English Wikipedia now lists Whirlpool’s Benton Harbor, Michigan, base as the brand’s headquarters. On the heating side, English Wikipedia says Japan’s Daikin agreed to buy Goodman in August 2012, as Reuters and The Wall Street Journal reported, and that the company was renamed Daikin Comfort Technologies North America from 1 April 2022, with Amana, Goodman and Janitrol among its brands.

The Iowa connection did not end. English Wikipedia says Whirlpool makes products under the Amana, JennAir, KitchenAid, Maytag and Whirlpool names at its plant in Amana, Iowa, in operation since 1940, and that the plant was sold in October 2020 under a long-term lease arrangement, as The Gazette of Cedar Rapids reported in December 2020.

Design and documentation.

American major-appliance brands — the washers, dryers, ranges, refrigerators and dishwashers that stand in a kitchen or laundry room for many years — can carry long and layered histories. A name on the front of a machine may have started with a single workshop or inventor, then passed through several corporate owners, mergers and renamings while the badge itself stayed in place.

That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly, one by one: who started it and where, which companies have owned it and when, where its machines are made today, and how its logo, colours and advertising have changed along the way. A brand that began as an independent maker may now be one label among several inside a larger appliance group, and the same name may be used differently from one country or decade to the next.

Each guide in this group separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its factories and its visual identity — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One name, two product families.

Amana’s visible identity has changed less often than its owners. A former Amana logo on Wikimedia Commons is captioned as in use from 1945 until 2016, and the brand history page on amana.com marks 2016 as the year a “new, streamlined logo” was unveiled “to reinforce simplicity, quality and value.”

The same company timeline shows how Amana has used product features as its story. Beyond the DeepFreeze, the side-by-side refrigerator and the Radarange, it lists a self-defrost refrigerator patent in 1954, a clothes dryer with a stainless steel drum in 1992, the Jot refrigerator with a dry-erase surface in 2007, and a 2009 partnership with the interior designer Thom Filicia on a series of colourful refrigerators. The same page adds a 24-inch-deep freestanding refrigerator in 1988, a refrigerator with a built-in messaging centre called The Messenger in 2001, antimicrobial component protection in top-load washers in 2006, and a hung-strut suspension in 2011 that the company says made upper-floor installation possible for front-load laundry pairs. The amana.com site in 2020 grouped refrigerators, freezers, ranges, wall ovens, cooktops, microwaves, dishwashers, washers and dryers under one roof.

Because the name is shared, Amana reads differently depending on the product. On a refrigerator or a washer it is a Whirlpool Corporation brand sold from amana.com; on a furnace or an air conditioner it belongs to the Daikin-owned Goodman business, which sells Amana-branded heating and cooling equipment alongside its own Goodman line. The place name links both: each traces back to the walk-in coolers built in a Middle Amana woollen mill in the 1930s.

For a design guide, Amana shows how a community’s place name can become a national product name and then split cleanly between two industries without changing its spelling. Compare it with Maytag, which brought Amana appliances into Whirlpool, and with Goodman, which holds the heating-and-cooling side of the name. For this guide we use colony red, woollen tan and frost with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Amana’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.