Taylor Brand Guidelines: The 1926 Illinois Freezer Maker Behind the Soft-Serve Counter

A 1926 freezer for restaurants that made their own ice cream.

Taylor began as Taylor Freezer. A history of Specialty Equipment Companies, Taylor’s owner from 1985, published on FundingUniverse, says Taylor Freezer was founded in 1926 in Rockton, Illinois, and sold its first ice cream freezer to a restaurant that same year. English Wikipedia, citing a 2002 history of soda fountains, names the founder as Charles Taylor, a third-generation ice cream maker from Buffalo, New York, and, citing a 2009 history of ice cream making, describes his countertop freezer as a machine that let restaurants make their own ice cream from mix.

The company tells the story in its own words. Taylor says its roots go back to an ice cream shop run by Charles Taylor, who had grown tired of how slowly ice cream was made and, the company says, invented the “very first automatic batch ice cream freezer.” When news of the invention spread, it says, he found himself in the equipment business, and one line of batch freezers grew into a range of ice cream, grill and frozen-beverage equipment. That “first” is Taylor’s own claim.

The early firm sat on the Illinois–Wisconsin line. A 2019 profile of the inventor L.A.M. Phelan, published by the Broaster Company, which he founded, says that in 1928 he returned to lead the Taylor Freezer Corporation in Beloit, Wisconsin, a business he had invested in; English Wikipedia also gives 1928 for Phelan becoming president. The profile says the Taylor Freezer line was later produced by Tekni-Craft, a partnership of more than forty employees using Taylor’s plant, and mentions Zesto, a chain of frozen custard stores. English Wikipedia dates Tekni-Craft to 1945 and Taylor Freezer’s franchising of the Zesto drive-in concept to the years 1945 to 1955.

McDonald’s, Beatrice and the grill.

Taylor’s longest customer relationship began in the 1950s. The FundingUniverse history says Taylor began supplying shake machines to McDonald’s in that decade; English Wikipedia, citing a 2006 Chicago Tribune report, dates a handshake agreement with Ray Kroc to 1956.

Ownership changed several times. English Wikipedia, citing a 1990 history of Beatrice, says Beatrice Foods bought the company in 1967. The FundingUniverse history records that in January 1985 Taylor and other former Beatrice equipment businesses passed to the newly formed Specialty Equipment Companies. English Wikipedia says United Technologies bought Specialty Equipment in 2000 and merged it into its Carrier unit, and that Middleby, of Elgin, Illinois, bought Taylor from UTC Climate, Controls & Security in 2018; Verdict Foodservice reported on 24 June 2018 that Middleby had completed the purchase of the business, a deal signed the month before.

Under Specialty Equipment, Taylor widened its range. The FundingUniverse history says that when Specialty bought it, Taylor made “cold” equipment — ice cream freezers and dispensers for frozen yogurt and frozen cocktails — and that within a year it moved into “hot” equipment such as flat grills. With McDonald’s it developed an automated “clam shell” grill, with upper and lower plates that cook both sides of a patty at once, under a joint patent, and it later developed a similar grill for other quick-service restaurants. It also held a patent on Softech, a memory system that automatically controlled how hard or soft a frozen product was. In 2018 Verdict Foodservice described Taylor as a maker of beverage equipment, soft serve and ice cream dispensing equipment, frozen drink machines and automated double-sided grills.

How ice cream machine makers present themselves.

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.

A brand met behind the counter.

Many people meet Taylor without reading its name, across a fast-food counter. Wired reported in April 2021 that the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine was standard equipment in more than 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the United States and tens of thousands more around the world. It described how the machine takes in liquid mix through a hopper and freezes it in a spinning barrel, and reported that the machines had a reputation among franchisees for being temperamental. The same story covered Kytch, a start-up whose add-on device worked with Taylor’s machines; Wired updated the article in May 2021 to note that Kytch had filed a lawsuit, and named Middleby as Taylor’s parent company.

Taylor sells through distributors rather than directly. Its website says it has more than 160 distributors in 125 countries, a figure Middleby’s brand page repeats, and that its headquarters remain in Rockton, Illinois; FundingUniverse counted more than 140 independent distributors in the late 1990s. Middleby’s page also describes a Taylor Technical Development Center for research, customer demonstrations and training. Taylor’s own pages present it under the heading “From 1926 To Middleby,” with soft-serve freezers and two-sided grills side by side.

For a design guide, Taylor shows how a brand that customers rarely notice by name can still shape a familiar moment: a cone or a shake handed over a counter. Compare Stoelting, the Wisconsin maker of soft-serve machines, and Carpigiani, the Bologna gelato-machine maker. For this guide we use a counter navy, a steel grey and a vanilla cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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