Nemox Brand Guidelines: Pontevico Gelato Makers for Home Counters and Professional Kitchens

Gelato machines for two kinds of kitchen.

Nemox makes gelato and sorbet machines for both home and professional kitchens. The business trades as Nemox International S.r.l. from Pontevico, a town in the province of Brescia in Lombardy, an address confirmed by the European Union’s LIFE programme database, which lists the company as the coordinating beneficiary of one of its projects.

On its own account Nemox has been designing and manufacturing gelato machines in Italy since 1986. The company says it has produced and distributed more than seven million machines in more than 180 countries, and that it was among the first companies in its sector to obtain ISO 9001 certification, in 1994. It describes every machine as “entirely created in Italy,” from concept and design to planning and production; those are the company’s claims.

The patent record shows the company working beyond ice cream in the early 2000s, under an earlier legal form. A European application for an iron connected to a steam generator, filed in September 2003 and published in 2006, names Nemox S.p.A. as applicant, and a 2004 Italian filing in the same name covers an infusion unit for a coffee machine. Later filings for ice cream machines, including an Italian application in 2017, are in the name of Nemox International S.r.l. Coffee machines remain in the catalogue today alongside the gelato range.

The company lists an office in the United States, Nemox USA, alongside its Italian headquarters, and a separate contact for Russia, and says it supports retailers and service centres through a dealer network.

From the freezer bowl to the touch screen.

Nemox divides its catalogue between home and professional machines. For the home it sells two kinds of gelato maker. Compressor models, with their own refrigeration, include the Gelato Pro 1700 Up, the automatic Gelato NXT1 and the Gelato Chef 2200; the company says they make about a kilogram or less per batch in 15 to 25 minutes. Accumulator models, such as the Dolce Vita and the Gelato Harlequin, use a bowl that is frozen in advance in a home freezer.

The professional range starts on the countertop. The Gelato Chef 3L and 5L Automatic and the Gelato 3K and 4K touch models are table-top machines that the company aims at restaurants, pastry shops, caterers and coffee shops, and the Crea NTC models extend the range further. The company says the Gelato 10K Crea NTC had its world premiere at Host Milano in 2025. Nemox also sells gelato display cases, blast chillers and the FRIX AIR, a table-top machine that blends single frozen portions held in colour-coded bowls.

Many models now carry the i-Green label, which comes out of a European Union project. According to the EU’s LIFE Public Database, Nemox International coordinated LIFE ICEGREEN (LIFE18 CCM/IT/001106), which ran from July 2019 to June 2021 with the aim of showing that ice cream machines using propane as a refrigerant, in place of hydrofluorocarbon gases, were technically and commercially viable, in line with the EU’s F-gas Regulation.

The database records that more than ten prototypes of domestic and professional machines were developed and certified, that Nemox revamped its main production line for the new models, and that the company had produced and sold more than 3,500 Icegreen machines by the end of the project. A planned network of small test shops, the “Icegreen Corners,” was cut back by the COVID-19 pandemic to five demonstration shops. Nemox’s own project page says the prototypes were shown at Host in 2019, the results were presented at the Sigep digital exhibition in 2021, and i-Green production began in July 2021.

The category.

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.

One brand for the chef and the family.

Nemox addresses two audiences with the same name. On its website the opening line runs “From Michelin-starred restaurants to home counters,” and its mission statement promises to bring the experience of artisan gelato to gelato shops and restaurants as well as to families at home. The company sums up its approach in four words — quality, functionality, competitive pricing and efficient management — and its slogan for the mission is “Innovate, simplify, inspire.”

That double audience shapes how the products are named. Home machines carry Italian-flavoured names such as Dolce Vita, Gelatissimo and Gelato Talent, while the professional table-top machines use numbers and letters: 3K, 4K, 5K and 10K. The website pairs product pages with a recipe section, downloadable catalogues and instruction manuals, and a professional area for chefs and dealers.

The i-Green label has become part of that presentation. Nemox gives the ICEGREEN project its own section on its website, with a timeline of prototypes, approvals and the start of production, and marks the European Union’s LIFE programme as a contributor. The EU database describes the project’s other strand as a new business model: small modular shop corners built around the machines, aimed at ice cream shops, confectioners, coffee shops and street-food sellers.

For a design guide, Nemox shows how one brand can stretch from a freezer-bowl home gadget to a professional countertop machine by keeping a single name and changing only the naming system beneath it. Compare Frigomat, a Lombard maker of professional batch freezers, and Hamilton Beach, an appliance brand for home kitchens. For this guide we use a sour-cherry red, a cream and a pistachio green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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