Stoelting Brand Guidelines: Kiel’s 1905 Freezer Maker, the Dairy Queen Story & Vollrath

A dairy-equipment maker in Kiel.

Stoelting is an American maker of frozen-treat equipment based in Kiel, Wisconsin. Its machines make soft serve and frozen yogurt, shakes and smoothies, frozen custard and Italian ice, frozen drinks, and gelato and premium ice cream in batches. Its website calls its Kiel site the Stoelting corporate headquarters and signs itself “Stoelting, A Vollrath Brand.”

The company dates itself to 1905, and the trade magazine Foodservice Equipment Reports gave the same founding year in May 2012. By the late 1930s it was trading as the Stoelting Brothers Company, a maker of dairy equipment, and that is the name under which it appears in the published history of Dairy Queen.

That history is the episode in Stoelting’s past that the sources read describe in most detail. According to the International Directory of Company Histories, published by St. James Press in 2001, the McCullough family of Illinois, who had developed a soft ice cream, went looking for a machine that could dispense semi-frozen dairy products straight into dishes or cones. They approached two makers of dairy equipment. The first turned them down at once; the second, Stoelting Brothers Company in Kiel, thought the idea lacked potential.

The McCulloughs then found a newspaper advertisement placed by Harry M. Oltz, who had patented a continuous freezer for soft ice cream in 1937. They met him in the summer of 1939 and obtained production rights to his design. The Directory records that the McCulloughs then returned to the Stoelting Brothers and reached an agreement with them to manufacture a soft-serve freezer for their own company. The first Dairy Queen store opened in Joliet, Illinois, on 22 June 1940.

Stoelting’s present owner tells the story from the maker’s side. The Vollrath Company’s website says Stoelting has been a leader in the industry since manufacturing the first soft-serve ice cream freezer machine for Dairy Queen more than 70 years ago. That wording is Vollrath’s own; the 2001 Directory account records that Stoelting Brothers agreed to build the McCulloughs’ freezer.

Freezers for every frozen treat.

Stoelting’s current range is organised by what the machine makes. Its soft serve and frozen yogurt machines come as countertop and floor models, gravity-fed or pressure-fed, and in single-flavour, twin-twist and double-cylinder designs, the company says. Countertop families include the F131 and E131 twin-twist machines and the single-flavour E111. The F131 uses a control system the company calls IntelliTec2, with a multiline graphic display that gives the operator instructions in full text; the E131 uses the earlier IntelliTec control.

Frozen custard has its own Stoelting family. The company’s continuous-flow custard freezers include the M202 and CC202 double-barrel machines and the CC303 triple-barrel machine, which also make Italian ice. The company says they use what it calls Quick-Freeze Technology, which it says keeps ice crystals small for a smoother product, and it offers refrigerated dipping cabinets alongside them.

The batch range is for gelato, premium ice cream, sherbet, sorbet and water ices. It is built around vertical batch freezers, from the countertop VB9 to floor machines such as the VB160, which the company says use a vertically oriented, large-diameter freezing cylinder. Shake and smoothie freezers and frozen beverage dispensers complete the range, with accessories sold separately.

The equipment is sold to a wide spread of outlets. Stoelting’s website groups its customers into industries that include custard shops, ice cream and frozen yogurt shops, quick-service restaurants and convenience stores, as well as stadiums and arenas, amusement and water parks, hotels, resorts and cruise lines, schools and senior living facilities. It also sells liquidated stock, new and refurbished, through a dedicated page.

Design and documentation.

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.

“Stoelting, A Vollrath Brand.”

Before 2012 Stoelting belonged to another Kiel manufacturer, Polar Ware. On 21 May 2012, Foodservice Equipment Reports reported that The Vollrath Company of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, had acquired the Kiel-based Polar Ware Co., including its Stoelting operation. The magazine noted that Vollrath and Polar Ware both trace their roots to 1874, when Jacob Vollrath opened his first enamelware plant in Sheboygan.

At the time of the sale Stoelting had three divisions: foodservice, which made freezers and soft-serve and frozen-beverage dispensing equipment, plus cleaning and process solutions equipment. The magazine reported that Polar Ware and Stoelting would remain separate entities under Vollrath, serving their existing channels.

The cheese side soon went its own way. On 1 November 2012 Packaging Insights carried the announcement that RELCO, a dairy-processing equipment maker in Willmar, Minnesota, had acquired the Kiel-based Stoelting Process Solutions product line — cheese vats, curd tables, block formers, draining and matting conveyors and salting belts. RELCO, a partner of Stoelting since 2008, said the Stoelting brand name would be kept for those products, sold through offices in Willmar, Drachten in the Netherlands and Auckland in New Zealand, with manufacturing moving from Kiel to its own fabrication shop in Willmar. So the Stoelting name now appears on two kinds of equipment, from two different owners.

Today Vollrath presents Stoelting as one of a family of brands. Its website lists Stoelting Foodservice beside Vollrath Foodservice, the Spanish cookware maker Pujadas, Polar Ware medical supplies, Vollrath Manufacturing Services and Stoelting Cleaning Equipment. The address stoelting.com forwards to stoeltingfoodservice.com.

For a design guide, Stoelting shows how a regional dairy-equipment name can become a frozen-treat brand inside a larger family company while keeping its own name and town. Compare Taylor Company, another American soft-serve machine maker, and Electro Freeze. For this guide we use a deep red and a custard yellow with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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