Turbo Air Brand Guidelines: The Long Beach Refrigerator Maker Founded in 1997

A Korean refrigeration engineer and a California headquarters.

Turbo Air is a maker of commercial refrigerators and freezers with its headquarters in Long Beach, California. The Los Angeles Korean-language newspaper Korea Daily reported in April 2026 that the company was founded in 1997 and that it makes commercial refrigeration and freezing equipment as well as equipment for preparing and storing food. The same report named its chairman, Brian Kim, as the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce’s 2026 City National Bank Entrepreneur of the Year, an award the paper said the chamber first gave in 1997.

Kim is the founder. In a letter printed in the company’s 2024 catalogue, signed as chief engineer and chief executive, he writes that he founded Turbo Air, and that at 25 he had started what he describes as South Korea’s first plant to mass-produce commercial refrigerators. The letter says he moved from South Korea to Los Angeles in 1985. It also claims that Turbo Air was the first company to put digital control into commercial refrigerators, in 1997; that is the company’s own account.

SEFA, a group of food-service equipment dealers, described Turbo Air as a family-owned company in a January 2022 KitchenBiz feature on the founder’s early years and the company’s growth. On its own website, the company’s “Our Story” page says Turbo Air has been making refrigerators for 20 years, and its group page speaks of “20 years of experience and knowledge.”

Reach-ins, prep tables and glass doors.

Turbo Air’s catalogue is built around the equipment found in restaurant kitchens and shops. On its website the company groups more than 500 refrigeration units into categories that include reach-in refrigerators and freezers, food-prep tables for pizza, sandwiches and salads, undercounters, worktops and chef bases, glass-door merchandisers, ice-cream merchandisers and dipping cabinets, open display merchandisers, bakery and deli cases, and underbar equipment such as bottle coolers, glass frosters and beer dispensers. There are also milk coolers, in single and dual access versions.

The products are sold in named series. The website lists the PRO, Super Deluxe, M3 and J series, along with an E Line. The PRO Series is the one the company presents as its premium line, with the claim “Proudly made in the USA” and the description “masterfully crafted, aesthetically designed.” The M3 reach-ins are described as having stainless steel cabinets and digital temperature control.

The feature the company puts first on its pages is what it calls the Self-Cleaning Condenser, which it says is patented and available only from Turbo Air. As the company describes it, a fine mesh filter catches dust while a rotating brush moves up and down two or three times a day to keep the condenser clear. The company says the feature is standard on most of its product lines. Other features it names include a “Turbo Cooling and Freeze” button, which lets the compressor run without a break for up to two hours, LED interior lighting and lit advertising panels on its merchandisers.

The group extends beyond reach-ins. Its website names three brands: Turbo Air itself; Turbo Air Refrigeration System, which sells unit coolers and condensing units under the motto “One call solution” and a combined product it calls SMART 7; and Bake Tech Innovation, a range of cooking and baking equipment that includes ranges, steam tables and bakery equipment. The group also lists divisions for supermarket refrigeration, butcher equipment, and sinks and worktables.

Turbo Air exhibits at trade fairs. Its news page lists stands at the NAFEM Show in Atlanta in February 2025 and the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago in May 2026, and at Exphotel in Cancún in 2024.

Cold rooms, cabinets and counters.

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.

Factories in four countries, run from Long Beach.

Turbo Air describes itself as an international group run from California. Its group page says the world headquarters is in Long Beach and that Turbo Air Group has four factories, in the USA, Korea, China and Vietnam, with sales branches in the USA, Korea, China, Europe and the Middle East, and products sold in 67 countries. Korea Daily put the figures slightly differently in April 2026: six production plants across the same four countries, and sales in more than 70 countries. The company’s “Our Story” page gives a shorter list of manufacturing sites — Texas, South Korea and China — so the pages do not all agree.

The company profile page lists the subsidiaries behind those figures. It names refrigerator-manufacturing subsidiaries in Gwangju and a freezer-manufacturing subsidiary in Suwon, both in South Korea; refrigerator, display-case and ice-maker manufacturing in Qingdao, China; and refrigerator manufacturing in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Sales offices are listed in Dubai, London and Sydney, with a cooking-equipment sales arm in Dallas. In the United States, the company says, it runs 13 branches, from Seattle to Miami, and works with 15 parts distributors.

The company frames its aims in plain language. Its profile page sets out three responsibilities — to customers, to employees and to the communities where it works — and its founder’s letter speaks of putting “innovation and consumer convenience” first. These are the company’s own statements of intent.

Korea Daily reported that the chamber chose Kim for his leadership of a global refrigerator maker and for his work in the community, and quoted his side as saying the company would keep working to become the world’s top firm in its field.

For a design guide, Turbo Air shows how a younger maker presents a broad catalogue through named series and one signature feature. Compare True Manufacturing, another American maker of reach-ins, and Beverage-Air. For this guide we use a deep navy, a pale frost and an amber accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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