Elmeco Brand Guidelines: The Naples Granita Machine Maker Behind the Royal and First Class

A bar-equipment workshop and a coffee roaster’s request.

Elmeco makes machines for granita, the Italian iced dessert, and for other frozen drinks. It is based at Casandrino, in the province of Naples, and traces itself to Salvatore Cortese. Italian Wikipedia says that at the end of the 1950s Cortese ran a firm with his brothers, F.lli Cortese, that serviced bar equipment, and that a Neapolitan coffee roaster, Passalacqua, asked him for a way to replace the hand-scraped ice of the traditional granita with a machine that was easier to keep clean and maintain.

The company tells the same story through Umberto Cortese, who later led the business. Before 1961, he says on Elmeco’s website, the family had a small workshop at San Liborio, in the Pignasecca quarter of central Naples; the first machines were built there by hand and went to three Passalacqua cafés. Elmeco calls the result “the first granita machine in the world” and dates both itself and that machine, the Royal, to 1961.

Italian Wikipedia gives a slightly different corporate history: it says Salvatore Cortese took over the company Elmeco — short for Elettromeccanica Cortese — from his brothers in 1989. The company’s own timeline says that Umberto Cortese became managing director in 1981 and that Alessandra Cortese joined the leadership in 1993; in 2025 Elmeco described the handover from Salvatore to Umberto and then to Alessandra at a Confindustria meeting on family succession.

From the Royal to the First Class.

The Royal, as Italian Wikipedia describes it, was a vertical granita machine that left the product fully on show: a refrigeration unit under a chilled plate, a round container with a tap, and two paddles turned by separate motors, one slowly scraping the ice that formed and the other mixing the product and pushing it out. It came in two capacities, 6 and 12. The point, the encyclopedia says, was that one machine now made, displayed and dispensed the granita.

The next step was horizontal. In 1983, Italian Wikipedia says, Cortese patented the Mach, which it calls the first horizontal granita machine, with a larger bowl, a single motor and an endless screw inside the tank; Elmeco’s timeline marks the same year as the move “from vertical to horizontal drive.” In 1996, the company says, its machines gained electronic control.

The model Elmeco still leads with is the First Class. Italian Wikipedia ties it to a 1995 patent for a vertical transmission that moves the product indirectly through gears, and says Elmeco remains the only maker of that design; the company dates the launch of the First Class, a twin-auger machine, to 2000. A United States patent for a “machine for producing slush, granita and other similar products,” naming Salvatore Cortese as inventor and Elmeco Srl as assignee, was filed in January 1996 and granted in April 1998, according to Google Patents. Elmeco says the First Class is used for granita, iced cappuccino, coffee and tea, cocktails, sorbets and lemonades, and sells it in single, double and triple versions.

Elmeco now describes itself less as a granita specialist than as a maker of “frozen beverage solutions” for the hotel, restaurant and café trade, with machines for granita, cold creams, cocktail bases and soft-serve. Its Be Coffee machine is sold for what the company calls a true black-coffee granita, and a “Ready to Mix” series on its website pairs the machines with frozen cocktail recipes such as the Tequila Sunrise and the Blue Margarita. Umberto Cortese has told the founding story in a book, L’impresa nello zaino, which the company quotes on its “About” page.

Machines, schools and fairs.

Ice cream machine makers sell equipment that most customers only glimpse from the other side of a counter. The trade’s visual language is stainless steel: batch freezers, the mantecatori from which fresh gelato is squeezed out, and soft-serve machines whose taps pour a single flavour or a twist of two. Wired, writing about one soft-serve machine in 2021, summed up the basic process: liquid mix fed in through a hopper and frozen in a spinning barrel. The Los Angeles Times, reporting from a gelato school near Bologna in 2010, heard instructors say that gelato is at its best as it comes out of the machine.

The finished product goes on show. The Gelato Museum Carpigiani’s account of the trade traces how the cone made gelato easy to eat in the street and how gelato moved out of tubs and into glass display cases, so that the shop counter itself became a stage for colour and texture.

Teaching is part of the pitch. Carpigiani opened a gelato school at its headquarters outside Bologna in 2003, and the Los Angeles Times found students there from more than 100 countries; Middleby describes a Technical Development Center for its Taylor brand used for research, customer demonstrations and training. Makers present their machines in working kitchens as much as in catalogues.

Trade fairs are the other stage. SIGEP World, held every January at the Rimini Expo Centre in Italy, presents itself as an international event for gelato, pastry, chocolate, coffee, bakery and pizza, with equipment and technology among its exhibitor sectors; La Repubblica reported that the first Gelato World Tour, in 2013, was organised with SIGEP. The guides that follow set out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and where its machines are made — and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Naples firm with an American office.

Elmeco’s timeline sets out its later range. It says it opened its first sales office in the United States in 2005 and launched the Big Biz twelve months later; added a soft-serve cream machine, the Quick Soft Cream, in 2011; launched the BLarge, BSmart and QSmart in 2015; and added backlit LED panels for customising the First Class in 2017. From 2019 it moved its machines to propane, R290, as the refrigerant, and says that by 2020 the whole range used it. In 2022 it added a screen for advertising on its granita machines, and in 2024 it launched the Matrix, a self-service frozen-drink machine.

The company remains in the Cortese family’s hands, by its own account, and lists three sites: its headquarters at Casandrino, a distribution centre at Rock Hill, South Carolina, and another in Mumbai. In November 2025 it marked twenty years in the United States, where it says its American company, Elmeco LLC, has a team of five. It names its export markets as including the Americas, Russia and Japan, with further business in the Philippines, Turkey, Taiwan and Malaysia, and lists certifications including ISO 9001, ISO 14001, NSF, ETL and CSA. Its news pages show it at fairs such as SIGEP, Host, Thaifex and the National Restaurant Show in Chicago.

For a design guide, Elmeco shows how a regional custom — the Neapolitan coffee bar’s granita — can become an export product without losing its origin story. Compare Bravo, another Italian family-run machine maker, and Carpigiani, the Bologna gelato machine maker. For this guide we use a bay teal, an ice white and a lemon yellow with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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