Manitowoc Ice Brand Guidelines: Kodiak 1964, the Snowflake & Pentair Since 2022

A shipyard company’s refrigeration arm.

Manitowoc Ice comes from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and from a company better known for ships and cranes. English Wikipedia says The Manitowoc Company was founded there in 1902 as a shipbuilding and ship-repair business, entered lattice-boom cranes in the mid-1920s and branched into commercial refrigeration equipment shortly after the Second World War. The same article says the group sold its marine division to the Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri at the end of 2008 and today makes cranes under names including Manitowoc, Grove, Potain and National Crane.

Ice came in the 1960s. On its own history page, Manitowoc Ice says its refrigeration arm, the Manitowoc Equipment Works, bought a Minneapolis ice-machine company called Kodiak, Inc. in 1964, and it dates the start of Manitowoc Ice to that purchase. The company says the Kodiak designs were complicated and prone to breakdowns, which led its engineers to a simpler design built around a vertical evaporator; it says Manitowoc Equipment Works filed a patent for it in 1966.

The company tells its early marketing with some relish. In 1967, it says, Manitowoc took its newest machines on the road in a 26-foot recreational vehicle nicknamed the “Manitowoc Ice-Mobile,” inviting refrigeration distributors and dealers in for a cold drink and a demonstration in an air-conditioned mobile showroom.

Production stayed in its home town. In 1994, the company says, it announced an addition of 120,000 square feet of factory space at its Manitowoc plant, where it built its millionth ice machine in 1999. Its sales and technical offices are still listed in Manitowoc.

Indigo, QuietQube and the snowflake.

Manitowoc Ice makes ice machines and the bins and dispensers around them. Its website groups the range into modular, undercounter and countertop ice machines, QuietQube remote machines, traditional remote machines, hotel ice dispensers and storage bins. The company says it introduced the QuietQube remote condenser in 2003 to cut heat and noise where the ice is used.

The current flagship family is Indigo, which the company says launched in 2011 as the first ice machine with an “EasyTouch” display; it says the later Indigo NXT won a KI (Kitchen Innovations) award in 2019. Its tagline is “Engineered for Ease.”

The company also sells water filtration for its machines, starting, it says, with the Tri-Liminator pre-filter of 1983, and it says it moved away from CFC refrigerants in 1993. When Pentair completed its purchase, it said the business would extend its water filtration and ice offering to foodservice customers, Foodservice Equipment Reports reported in July 2022, adding that Manitowoc Ice had more than 800 employees, around a million machines installed worldwide and more than 200 models of commercial ice machines.

The company’s history page closes with the Manitowoc snowflake, the symbol it uses for the brand, and says Manitowoc machines are found in hospitals, hotels, restaurants and retirement homes around the world. Its website runs regional versions for the Americas, for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, for Asia-Pacific and for India, with local distributor and service locators, a training section and a downloads library that includes AutoCAD and Revit files.

Ice, steel and the trade floor.

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 Manitowoc to Welbilt to Pentair.

For most of its life the ice business sat inside The Manitowoc Company’s foodservice division. English Wikipedia says the group bought SerVend International, a maker of ice and beverage dispensing equipment, in October 1997, and in 2008 bought the British foodservice group Enodis, after which it had to sell the Enodis ice brands, Scotsman and Ice-O-Matic among them, to meet competition concerns. In March 2016 Manitowoc spun its foodservice operations off as a separate listed company, Manitowoc Foodservice, made up, Wikipedia says, of 23 global brands, which later renamed itself Welbilt; the crane business kept The Manitowoc Company name.

The next change also came through competition rules. In 2022 the Italian Ali Group was buying Welbilt. Foodservice Equipment Reports reported in July 2022 that Welbilt sold Manitowoc Ice to address concerns about commercial ice makers raised by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, which accepted the sale to Pentair, a water-treatment company, earlier that month. Pentair agreed the purchase in March 2022 and completed it on 28 July 2022; the Ali Group completed its Welbilt purchase the next day. The website now presents the brand as “Manitowoc Ice from Pentair Water Solutions.” Its history page lists joining Pentair as the milestone for 2022 and describes the pairing of the Manitowoc ice legacy with Pentair’s water-treatment knowledge as a “win-win.” The same page dates the business as nearly 60 years old.

That leaves a naming trap. The company simply called Manitowoc today is the crane maker; Manitowoc Ice shares its town and its early history but has had a separate owner since the 2016 spin-off and is now part of Pentair.

For a design guide, Manitowoc Ice shows how a place name can carry across two very different industries and three owners. Compare Scotsman, whose ice business passed through the same Enodis deal, and Hoshizaki, another maker of commercial ice machines. For this guide we use a lake blue, a pale ice and a frost white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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