Imperial Brown® is one of the world’s top manufacturers of custom walk-in coolers and freezers.
Imperial Walk-in Coolers was started in Portland in 1970 by Al Zell to serve the commercial refrigeration industry by manufacturing the insulated panels used to build walk-in coolers and freezers.
In 2012, Imperial Manufacturing of Portland, OR, acquired W.A. Brown & Son of Salisbury, NC, a 100-year-old walk-in cooler manufacturer, to form Imperial Brown. In a four-year period, the North Carolina plant grew from 40 employees to 130, with a $15 million increase in revenue.
In 2017, Imperial Brown acquired a third manufacturing facility located in Prague, OK, with plans to invest more than $1.5 million in new equipment in the plant within the initial two-year period of ownership. In July 2023, Imperial Brown opened factory number four in Tucson, AZ. The AZ plant is on scale with our NC and OR factories and is fully producing our products to support the southwestern United States.
Effective June 11, 2024, IB will be having a ribbon cutting ceremony for groundbreaking on factory number five in Shawnee, OK. This will be the largest factory companywide which is necessary to continue our growth in the middle of the country. We expect to begin shipping from the new factory by mid-2025.
With locations networked on the East and West coasts and in the Heartland, we are positioned to serve customers promptly and cost-efficiently.
We continually refine products, using the most up-to-date materials and engineering expertise to provide world-class products that withstand the most extreme temperature and weather conditions. The company is a leader in temperature management facilities for food service, biotechnology, medical, and building construction industries. We manufacture walk-in coolers and freezers for restaurants and commercial kitchens, cold storage components for fish processing plants, ice makers for dam construction, wide range testing chambers, pharmaceutical development and manufacturing, high humidity and dry chambers, robotic enclosures, and archival storage chambers for some of the most valuable and fragile documents in human history.
