Ice Make Refrigeration is a specialist manufacturer that builds the cold rooms, freezers, and cooling plants that keep India’s food, milk, and medicines from spoiling - a business built on the simple fact that a country losing roughly 38% of its food production to poor storage needs a lot of refrigeration. Founded in 1989 as a small workshop making equipment for retail stores, the company has grown over three decades into a publicly listed, multi-factory operation serving more than 25,000 customers across 24 countries, with everything still designed and made in-house. The recurring approach is to take a core competence in cooling, add manufacturing capability for the insulated panels and coils that go into it, and then move into adjacent products - cold rooms led to transport containers, which led to dairy processing plants, which led to the freezers that sit in ice-cream parlours - each step funded by the cash flows of the one before.
Business segments
A single refrigeration engine expressed through six product lines - cold rooms, commercial cabinets, industrial chillers, transport containers, ammonia-based turnkey plants, and continuous insulated panels - all sharing the same manufacturing backbone, customer base, and cooling know-how.
1. Cold rooms and cold storage: the foundation that everything else rests on
The company’s largest and oldest product line builds the walk-in insulated chambers that preserve perishables at temperatures from +15°C down to -40°C, contributing half of total revenue.
- Built panel by panel in-house - cold rooms are assembled from polyurethane or polystyrene-core insulated panels with steel, aluminium, or composite-plastic skins, manufactured in thicknesses from 60 mm to 150 mm at the company’s own plants, so quality and cost are controlled from raw material to finished chamber.
- Custom, not catalogue - while modular flat-pack rooms suit standard needs, the company also designs and builds cold rooms to a customer’s exact specifications, charging an engineering fee for the bespoke work, which locks in relationships with buyers who have unusual space or temperature requirements.
- Solar-powered version for the farm gate - a plug-and-play solar cold room called SOLOPerifresh, launched recently as of March 2022, runs on a thermal battery that provides up to 30 hours of backup without sunlight, letting farmers hold produce longer and sell when prices are better rather than dumping it at harvest.
- Project-scale credibility - the company has delivered a 4,700-metric-tonne butter cold store for Panchmahal Dairy worth ₹15 Crores and a cold storage project for the National Dairy Development Board, wins that signal it can handle large, reference-grade installations.
2. Ammonia refrigeration and turnkey projects: the big-plant engine
When a dairy, brewery, or ice-cream maker needs an entire industrial refrigeration plant built from scratch, ammonia is the only refrigerant that works at that scale - and this division delivers the whole project.
- Ammonia is the industry standard - in food, dairy, beverage, and ice-cream processing, ammonia offers cost-efficiency and lower power consumption than alternatives, and the company’s turnkey scope covers cold stores, water chillers, glycol chillers for milk deep-chilling, and LP receivers for retrofit plants.
- Large, lumpy orders - a single ammonia project can be substantial, such as a ₹35 Crore order spanning Jammu & Kashmir, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh, making this the division that can swing the company’s fortunes in any given year.
- Started in 2018, already a material contributor - despite being one of the newer verticals, ammonia projects generated 17% of FY25 revenue, showing how quickly the company leveraged its existing cold-chain reputation to move up the value chain into full-plant work.
3. Commercial refrigeration: the high-volume, standardised line
This is the business of plug-in refrigerators, freezers, and display cabinets that sit in restaurant kitchens, hospital pharmacies, and retail shops - smaller ticket sizes but sold in far greater numbers.
- Standardised products with fast cooling - the range spans reach-in refrigerators, merchandising freezers, milk chillers, and ice-cream mix plants, all using direct-expansion cooling and durable stainless-steel tanks, with a compact footprint that suits space-constrained commercial kitchens.
- The dark-store specialist - the company claims to supply more than half the refrigeration for India’s quick-commerce dark stores, those micro-warehouses that fulfil 10-minute grocery deliveries, and it exclusively provided 1,200 customised freezers to BigBasket.
- Dairy processing entry point - since 2020, the division has built multi-purpose dairy plants handling 30,000 to 50,000 litres of milk per day, including one in Nepal and another in Kota, Rajasthan, extending the company’s reach from cooling equipment into light process-plant work.
4. Transport refrigeration: the mobile cold chain
Refrigerated containers and truck bodies that keep goods frozen or chilled while they move - a product line that turns a truck into a moving cold room.
- Containers that travel on trucks - the range includes glass-reinforced-plastic refrigerated containers, eutectic mobile containers that hold temperature without a running engine, and MS corrugated refrigerated containers, all maintaining temperatures from +15°C down to -25°C.
- A dedicated factory of its own - the Vamaj facility in Mehsana, Gujarat, was expanded in 2021 on 11,500 square metres of land specifically for transport refrigeration, giving the division its own manufacturing space 15 kilometres from the main plant.
- Validated by a UN mission - the company collaborated with Ashok Leyland to complete the UN Mission Refrigerated Truck Project, a credential that matters when bidding for institutional and government cold-chain tenders.
5. Industrial refrigeration: the process-cooling workhorse
Chillers and ice-building tanks that cool industrial processes - not preserving food, but keeping machinery, chemicals, and production lines at the right temperature.
- Water, brine, and oil chilling - the product line spans water-chilling plants from 2 to 200 tonnes of refrigeration, brine-chilling plants, oil-chilling plants, and ice-building tanks that hold between 5,000 and 100,000 litres of water, serving plastics, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, beverages, and mineral-water producers.
- The smallest standalone contributor - at 3% of FY25 revenue, this is a niche line, but it extends the company’s reach into industries that are not part of the food cold chain, diversifying the customer base beyond perishables.
6. Continuous PUF panels: the building block sold to others
Insulated sandwich panels - the same core component that goes into the company’s own cold rooms - now manufactured on a continuous line and sold as a standalone construction material.
- Beyond cold storage into buildings - the panels, with cores of PU, PIR, or rockwool and skins of pre-painted steel, stainless steel, or aluminium in thicknesses from 30 mm to 150 mm, are used for prefab accommodation, pre-engineered buildings, industrial enclosures, and clean rooms, not just cold rooms.
- Distributed through building-material channels - instead of selling only to cold-chain buyers, the company is pushing continuous panels through building-material traders and tying up with pre-engineered-building manufacturers, opening a distribution channel that looks more like a construction-supply business.
Manufacturing and distribution backbone
Five factories, in-house coil-making, and a distribution network that reaches from Gujarat to the North-East - the shared infrastructure that every product line draws on.
- Five plants with distinct roles - the main Dantali plant in Gandhinagar houses corporate offices and makes condenser and evaporator coils in-house; Vamaj is dedicated to transport refrigeration; Bavla runs the new continuous-panel and chest-freezer lines; Chennai serves the South through subsidiary Bharat Refrigerations; and Kolkata, operated through subsidiary IceBest, is a pilot unit giving the company a low-cost foothold in the under-served Eastern market where no competitor manufactures locally.
- Backward integration where it counts - making its own condenser and evaporator coils at Dantali means the company does not depend on outside suppliers for the heat-exchange components at the heart of every refrigeration system, controlling both cost and quality.
- A dealer network that reaches the retail buyer - for the commercial-freezer line, the company has built a network of over 1,120 dealers and 16 exclusive brand shops that display only Ice Make freezers, giving customers a physical touch-and-feel experience without the company carrying the real-estate cost.
- Export presence constrained by logistics - the company ships to 24 countries including the US, Japan, and Australia, but refrigeration equipment is bulky and freight costs are high, which historically made it hard to compete with Chinese manufacturers on price; US certification was in its final stages as of early 2025, which could open a market where the company already has an associate generating regular business.
Group structure and partners
A family-led, promoter-operated company with two small wholly owned subsidiaries that extend its geographic reach, and a next generation already running divisions.
- Three co-founders still at the helm - Chairman Chandrakant Patel (34+ years) heads sales, marketing, finance, and R&D; Joint Managing Directors Rajendra Patel and Vipul Patel (27+ years each) oversee production, quality, purchase, and HR respectively, giving the company deep continuity in technical and commercial leadership.
- Bharat Refrigerations covers the South - acquired in 2016 and based in Chennai, this subsidiary operates under the ‘Bharat’ and ‘TransFreez’ brands with a similar product range to the parent but on a smaller scale, and is relocating to a newly acquired 1.42-acre site in Tiruvallur for better infrastructure.
- IceBest is the Eastern pilot - incorporated in December 2022 and now wholly owned, this subsidiary runs a small manufacturing unit in Howrah, Kolkata, producing PUF panels and testing the East Indian market where no competitor has local production, giving Ice Make a freight-cost advantage if the market develops.
- The next generation is already in operating roles - three sons of the founders, all in their mid-twenties, head the transport-refrigeration, continuous-panel, and commercial-refrigeration divisions respectively, suggesting a deliberate succession plan that embeds family continuity in day-to-day operations.