Follett Brand Guidelines: The Easton Ice Bin Maker Behind Chewblet Ice, Owned by Middleby

A sales partnership in New York.

Follett makes ice machines, ice storage bins and ice and beverage dispensers, and it began by selling bins rather than making them. The company’s own history dates it to 1948, when Roy Follett and Henry Korber founded Korber Sales and Manufacturing in New York. The business sold ice storage bins, made for it by subcontractors, to distributors of York ice machines. The trade magazine Foodservice Equipment Reports also gave 1948 as the founding year when it reported the company’s sale in May 2016.

The name changed early. In 1951, the company says, Roy Follett bought out his partner and formed the Roy Follett Corporation, moving its sales office to Long Island. His son Don Follett joined in 1954, and in 1957 the company brought bin manufacturing in-house, moving into a 20,000-square-foot building in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Easton.

The move to Pennsylvania came ten years later. In 1967, by the company’s account, it took a 63,000-square-foot plant in Easton, incorporated as Follett Corporation and added vending machines and ice merchandisers to its bin business. A Middleby press release of December 2019 places that plant in Forks Township, just outside the city, and says it had been expanded and modernised several times since. Easton remains the company’s address and its headquarters.

The Follett family ran the company for three generations. Don Follett’s son Steve Follett became president and chief executive in 1994, the company says, and Don remained chairman until 2001. Both men served as presidents of NAFEM, the North American Association of Food Equipment Manufacturers, according to the company’s timeline.

From York’s machine to Chewblet ice.

Follett’s product story runs through another maker’s patent. In 1968, the company says, York patented an ice machine that made nugget ice and pushed it up a tube into a container above the machine, and Follett built that machine into a 100-pound freestanding dispenser. In 1970 it agreed to make bins for York as an original equipment manufacturer, and in 1977 it bought the rights to York’s diced-ice machine and its patents and began making its own nugget-ice machines. That line became Maestro, and in 2003 Follett trademarked Chewblet as the name for the soft nugget ice its machines had made since 1977.

Dispensers followed. Follett says it introduced the first undercounter ice and beverage dispenser in 1973, the forerunner of its current Vision line; it added the U150 undercounter dispenser in 1989, the Ice Transport System in 1991 and the Symphony countertop ice and water dispensers in 1993. Later lines included the Ice Pro bagging system of 2003 and the Horizon ice machine of 2004, whose remote-fill system, first called Satellite-Fill, was renamed RIDE, for remote ice delivery equipment, in 2012.

Awards are recorded in the company’s timeline and in the trade press. Follett says the Horizon ice machine was named Product of the Year by the Foodservice Consultants Society International in 2004, and its Ice Manager diverter system in 2007. In May 2016 Foodservice Equipment Reports reported that the Horizon Elite ice machine had received a 2016 Kitchen Innovations award from the National Restaurant Association and had been named runner-up for the society’s 2016 Product of the Year.

The range has also moved beyond foodservice. Follett says it entered medical-grade refrigeration in 2003 with an undercounter refrigerator, and its website now lists refrigerators and freezers for hospitals, pharmacies and laboratories alongside ice machines and dispensers for restaurants and offices, under names such as Champion and Symphony Plus.

Design and documentation.

Beverage dispensing makers sell to two very different counters. In a pub or bar, the visible parts are the font on the bar top and the tap handles fixed to it, which usually carry the brewer’s branding while the equipment maker’s name sits on the hardware underneath. In a quick-service restaurant, the visible part is the post-mix tower or self-serve dispenser, where drink brands and, more and more, touchscreens take over the front panel.

Most of the machinery is out of sight, so the makers explain it on paper. Catalogues and spec sheets lean on cutaway diagrams of coolers, carbonators and insulated beer lines, on line drawings and wiring diagrams, and on photographs of keg cellars and cold rooms where kegs, gas cylinders and couplers are connected. The literature is written for installers, service technicians and distributors as much as for the owner of the bar.

The trade meets at shows. The National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago gathers foodservice equipment, including fountain dispensers and ice machines; BrauBeviale in Nuremberg covers brewing and the wider beverage supply chain; and the Craft Brewers Conference in the United States brings draught-system suppliers face to face with brewers. Makers also name certifications, audits and sustainability ratings in their own newsrooms, as Lancer does with its ISO certificates.

Ownership often runs through larger groups. Lancer has been part of the Japanese refrigeration maker Hoshizaki since 2006, according to Hoshizaki’s corporate history, and Cornelius went to Berkshire Hathaway when the British engineering group IMI agreed to sell it in 2013, according to English Wikipedia; its website now says it is powered by Marmon Foodservice Technologies. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

A family firm inside Middleby.

The family era ended in 2016. On 18 May that year Foodservice Equipment Reports reported that The Middleby Corporation, the foodservice equipment group based in Elgin, Illinois, had acquired the family-owned Follett Corp. of Easton, with manufacturing in Easton and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and in Gdansk, Poland. Middleby’s chairman and chief executive, Selim Bassoul, called Follett “a strategic fit with our growing beverage platform,” the magazine reported; the British trade site Cooling Post carried the same news on 23 May 2016. The company became Follett LLC, which it describes as an independent operating company of Middleby.

Leadership passed outside the family in 2019, when Steve Follett retired after more than three decades and was succeeded by Korey Kohl, who also led the Middleby Beverage Group. In December 2019 Middleby announced a 90,000-square-foot addition in Forks Township, which it said would bring all manufacturing and support work into one location, with completion expected by mid-2021. The Gdansk plant, opened in 2005, is now part of a sister Middleby division, QualServ, the company says.

Follett has since grown by acquisition of its own. In 2024, it says, it added a plant in Colorado when Kloppenberg, an ice storage, transport and dispensing maker that dates itself to 1941, began operating under Follett as Follett Denver, at Englewood, keeping both brand names. The company now gives its home as more than 225,000 square feet of plant and office space in the Lehigh Valley, where it says its headquarters and main manufacturing are based, and its website still carries the Middleby logo. The company now trades as Follett Products, LLC, the name on its website, and uses the address follettice.com.

For a design guide, Follett shows how a maker can turn one product feature into a brand: Chewblet names the ice itself rather than the machine. Compare Lancer and Cornelius, two other American makers of beverage dispensing equipment. For this guide we use a glacier blue, a deep water blue and a frost white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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