Ice-O-Matic Brand Guidelines: The Denver Ice Machine Maker That Passed From Enodis to Ali Group

A Denver company that dates itself to 1952.

Ice-O-Matic makes commercial ice machines in Denver, Colorado, and dates itself to 1952. Its product guide of September 2024 carries the line “Perfecting Ice Since 1952” and says that founder Dave Smith’s mission “was to offer the best ice machines in the business with a single-minded focus on top-quality ice.” Its website today speaks of “more than 70 years” of building ice machines. Those are the company’s own dates.

What the company stresses now is that it keeps everything in one place. Its website says that “sales, service, design, and manufacturing” are “all in Denver,” and that keeping every team in one building lets it move quickly on new projects, service calls and the next generation of equipment. The same 2024 product guide says Ice-O-Matic products are “designed and assembled in America,” describes the company as “a U.S.-based company with over 200 employees worldwide” and refers to “its Denver factory.” The trade magazine Foodservice Equipment Reports described it in September 2019 as “Denver-based Ice-O-Matic.”

The company writes its name with two hyphens and capitals for the I, O and M, and that spelling is used throughout this guide.

Cubes, nuggets, flakes and bins.

Ice-O-Matic’s range is built around the shape of the ice. Its website groups the machines into cubers, which it describes as making full cubes for restaurants, bars and hospitality; nugget machines, making what it calls soft, chewable ice for beverage and healthcare operations; flake machines, for produce, seafood and food display; and gourmet machines for specialty cubes used in cocktails. Alongside them it sells storage bins and dispensers, remote condensers and accessories.

The company’s own account of what sets its machines apart is practical rather than stylistic. It lists nickel-plated evaporators, which it says are engineered for corrosion resistance and a consistent harvest; front-access components that it says reduce service time; simple controls meant to reduce operator error and training; and smooth interior surfaces intended to shorten cleaning. These are the company’s descriptions of its own products.

Refrigerants and energy use are the other theme. Ice-O-Matic says it is moving its platforms to lower global-warming-potential refrigerants, naming R-290 and R-449A, and it publishes a list of models that it says meet the US ENERGY STAR requirements. Its 2024 product guide adds that it uses recycled packaging materials and recycles industrial and office waste.

The brand reaches buyers mainly through the foodservice trade: dealers, specifiers and service agents, with the website given over to specification sheets, price lists, parts manuals, a service-technician finder and design files for kitchen planners. Its reach goes beyond the United States: when Foodservice Equipment Reports covered changes to Ice-O-Matic’s sales team in September 2019, it said the new director of sales would handle national accounts, the company’s global business with Starbucks, and markets in Asia and other international regions, while regional managers covered Colorado and a group of lower Midwest states.

Design and documentation.

Commercial refrigeration is a trade that sells itself through equipment people rarely notice. In restaurant kitchens it appears as rows of stainless steel reach-in refrigerators and freezers, undercounter units and prep tables, built to be cleaned, opened hundreds of times a day and serviced on site. Its makers present those cabinets plainly: model numbers, door counts, capacities and finishes, with the brand name on a small badge or kick plate.

In shops the same makers face the customer. Glass-door merchandisers, open-air cases and curved glass display counters hold drinks, dairy and prepared food at the point of sale, and many carry the colours of a bottler or a grocer rather than the maker’s own. Ice machines sit between the two worlds: a machine that turns water into cubes, flakes or nuggets, usually above a bin, in a bar, hotel corridor or hospital kitchen.

The industry meets at trade fairs. The NAFEM Show in the United States, organised by the North American Association of Food Equipment Manufacturers, HOST in Milan and HostelCo in Barcelona are among the places where makers show new cabinets and ice machines to dealers, consultants and chain buyers. Restaurant association shows have played the same role for decades: True Manufacturing, for one, first showed its foodservice line at the National Restaurant Association show in 1972, according to a 2017 profile in the FCSI magazine.

Ownership varies widely across the names in this guide: some remain family companies, some are listed groups such as Japan’s Hoshizaki, and others now sit inside larger equipment groups. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Enodis to Ali Group and the Welbilt name.

Ice-O-Matic has spent recent decades inside larger groups. English Wikipedia lists “Ice-O-matic (refrigeration)” among the brands of Enodis, the British food-equipment group that grew out of the Manchester business S&W Berisford, bought the US companies Welbilt in 1995 and Scotsman in 1999, and took the Enodis name in 2000. The American machinery maker The Manitowoc Company bought Enodis in October 2008, and, English Wikipedia says, Manitowoc’s foodservice arm was required to sell the Enodis ice division — including the Ice-O-Matic, Scotsman, Simag and Barline brands — to address antitrust concerns.

The buyer, in 2009, was the private-equity firm Warburg Pincus, which ran the ice business as Scotsman Industries of Vernon Hills, Illinois. When Foodservice Equipment Reports reported on 6 November 2012 that the Italian foodservice group Ali Group would acquire Scotsman “and all of its brands, including Ice-O-Matic,” it listed those brands as Scotsman Ice, BarLine, Crystal Tips, Ice-O-Matic, Icematic, Simag and Tecnomac, made in five plants. Ali Group’s own history dates the purchase to 2012 and describes Scotsman Industries as the largest ice machine maker in the world. In April 2021 The Ashton Report noted that Ali Group North America, “already” the owner of Scotsman and Ice-O-Matic, had bought the Erie, Pennsylvania, large-cube maker Kold-Draft.

The latest change came through Welbilt. Manitowoc’s former foodservice arm had become a separate listed company in 2016 and renamed itself Welbilt, English Wikipedia says, and Ali Group completed its purchase of Welbilt in 2022. On 11 March 2024, Foodservice Equipment Reports reported, Ali Group North America said it would operate under the Welbilt name, with a redesigned Welbilt logo. Ice-O-Matic’s website now ends with the line that it “is a Welbilt brand — Ali Group’s North American operating brand.” So a brand sold out of Manitowoc’s food-equipment business in 2009 now sits under the name that business later took.

For a design guide, Ice-O-Matic shows how a product name can stay constant while the owners above it change. Compare Scotsman, its long-time stablemate, and Beverage-Air, another Ali Group refrigeration name. For this guide we use a deep navy, a pale ice blue and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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