Refrigerator Manufacturing: From Icebox to ABB Cobots

Refrigerator manufacturing is one of the oldest mass production jobs in the home, and it still mixes sheet metal, foam insulation, a sealed cooling circuit and a door that has to seal every time it closes. This post follows the fridge from the icebox through the first electric models and the GE Monitor Top, then looks at what factories do today, including a new Brazilian plant that LG says turns out a unit every 14 seconds. It then covers where ABB robots fit and what is still hard.

A two door refrigerator photographed in China in 2026. Photo: TurnOnTheNight / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How iceboxes became refrigerators on the factory floor

Before the refrigerator there was the icebox. Thomas Moore, an American farmer and cabinetmaker, built one in 1802 to carry butter to market in Georgetown. A commercial ice cutter followed in 1827, and by the 1840s companies such as Baldwin and Ranney were making home iceboxes. Later models had hollow walls lined with tin or zinc and packed with cork, sawdust, straw or seaweed. Ice was cut in winter, stored in ice houses and delivered by the iceman, and households bought more whenever the old block melted.

Cutting ice and hauling it to an ice house, New York, 1852. Photo: Anonymous / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Mechanical cooling arrived in small steps. Frederick Wolf of Fort Wayne, Indiana, made some of the first home electric units in 1913, mounted on top of an icebox. Kelvinator brought out the first refrigerator with automatic control in 1918, and William Durant founded Frigidaire the same year to mass produce them. In 1923 Frigidaire introduced the first self contained unit. In 1922 two Swedish students, Baltzar von Platen and Carl Munters, invented the absorption refrigerator, which Electrolux turned into a worldwide success.

A Frigidaire refrigerator made by General Motors, the brand William Durant founded in 1918. Photo: The 0utsider1 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

General Electric's Monitor Top, introduced in 1927, was the first refrigerator in widespread use, and over a million were made. Its cooling unit sat in a round housing on top of the cabinet, which gave it the name. Its refrigerants were dangerous, since early models used sulfur dioxide or methyl formate. Freon, introduced in the 1920s, was safer and low in toxicity, and it expanded the market through the 1930s. By then the icebox industry had grown from 4.5 million dollars in 1889 to 26 million in 1919, and mechanical refrigeration took that market over in the early 1930s.

Two General Electric Monitor Top refrigerators of 1929 at the Tallahassee Automobile Museum. Photo: Michael Rivera / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What a fridge line does today, and where ABB fits

LG opened a plant in Paraná, Brazil, on 17 August 2026 with an investment of about 310 million dollars and a capacity of about 600,000 refrigerators a year, which LG describes as one unit every 14 seconds. LG says articulated robots handle physically demanding or higher risk tasks, including transporting refrigerator doors, and its Vision AI inspection checks quality. It is LG's second home appliance plant in Brazil after Manaus, and the fridges are built for both 127 volt and 220 volt supplies. A CPG Click report on 22 September repeated the figures. ET Manufacturing reported on 15 October that Thermocool plans to invest ₹40 crore in a new plant in Ghaziabad, India, to expand appliance manufacturing. LG does not say which company supplied its robots.

An ABB cobot beside a refrigerator line at Electrolux in Curitiba, Brazil, with a technician holding a teach pendant. Photo: ABB

The steps behind that rate are fairly standard. Sheet steel is formed into a cabinet shell, and the walls are filled with polyurethane foam, a plastic Otto Bayer first made in 1937. Foaming machines inject the mixture into the cavity while fixtures hold the shell against the pressure of the expanding foam. A 2018 KraussMaffei case study describes one such line at Criotec, with a loading shuttle and six fixtures, foaming about 1,800 refrigerator housings a day across three shifts. After foaming come the compressor, the door and the tests.

New refrigerator cabinets, one with its door open, at the Gazoapparat plant in Moscow, 1954. Photo: Glavarkhiv Moscow / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The best documented ABB refrigerator job is at Electrolux in Curitiba, Brazil. ABB reported in 2024 that a YuMi cobot now does gas leak detection on the line, automating all of those checks that operators once did by hand. A GoFa CRB 15000 replaced another maker's robot at the electrical test station on the multi door line, with an 8 percent gain in test effectiveness, fewer unplanned stops and, ABB says, 100 percent reliability since installation. Our post on ABB cobots on appliance lines covers the plant in more detail.

An ABB YuMi dual arm cobot working at the gas leak detection station on Electrolux's refrigerator line. Photo: ABB

Heavier robots, smarter cells and the open problems

Compressors are the next place to look. In 2021 an Italian cell built by BDG, BAI and ABB's Italian company used a single arm YuMi to place a terminal block and connector on refrigerator compressors, with a camera to find the three pins and a load cell to measure insertion force. Our compressor manufacturing post covers that part of the product. Foaming and door handling are heavier jobs. ABB sells larger arms such as the IRB 6700 for them, but I found no ABB case on foam lines, so that is a possibility only.

A close view of an ABB GoFa CRB 15000 at the electrical test station on Electrolux's refrigerator line. Photo: ABB

At home, refrigerators are getting more connected rather than more robotic. Money Today reported on 13 October that Samsung showed a fridge that recognizes ingredients and LG showed a robot that presents a bouquet at an AI event. On 30 September, 36Kr wrote about home robots priced no higher than a refrigerator. Those are announcements, not products on shelves. For now the useful link between factory and home is quality checking, such as the gas leak and electrical tests that Electrolux automated in Curitiba.

LG's home appliance zone at CES 2012. Photo: LG Electronics / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The open problems are practical. Cost matters most for small plants, since a cobot cell needs fixtures and integration work on top of the arm. Safety needs a plan wherever a person and a robot share a test station, as at Electrolux. Skills are the third gap, because someone has to program and simulate a new model before it arrives. Teams usually do that first in RobotStudio, so the program is tested on a computer before anything is bolted down, and the same cell can then take the next fridge model with less rework.

An ABB representative and an Electrolux operator discuss the cobot cell on the refrigerator line in Curitiba. Photo: ABB

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