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Aofrio delivers the industry's leading intelligent hardware and software…

AoFrio iQ

SCS 800

AoFrio delivers the industry’s leading intelligent hardware and software.

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AoFrio was founded in 1986, built on a single new idea in motor technology. Four decades on, that same drive to improve technology is still what moves us. Discover the story of AoFrio as we celebrate 40 years of innovation and progress.

AoFrio&#8217;s story starts in 1986 in New Zealand. Founder Peter Clark filed a patent for a novel motor design in 1987, laying the technical groundwork for what would become AoFrio&#8217;s core innovation.
At a time when shaded-pole motors were the industry standard, the company&#8217;s efficient new design was years ahead of what others were building, with the company patenting and licensing its motor design for everything from golf carts and dishwashers to solar powered cars.
As Peter Barnes, AoFrio&#8217;s Product Director – Motors says, AoFrio started as &#8220;a tiny company on the far side of the world with a good idea.&#8221;

Christian Olvido joined the company as employee #19 in September 2001, just as the company was making a strategic shift. &#8220;We changed from licensing the motor technology to manufacturing motors ourselves,&#8221; Christian recalls.
Early applications for motors included ventilation and heat recovery systems, hospital clean rooms, evaporative coolers, compressors, and ceiling fan manufacturers. The company grew by investing in engineering, including development of the ECR line of refrigeration motors, keeping pace as global market demand for more efficient motors grew.

Latin America became the company&#8217;s fastest growing market, built by Erick Layseca, a man with deep OEM relationships across Mexico who joined the company in the late 2000s. Erick grew the Latin American regional team and built the foundation for enduring customer partnerships, as the company&#8217;s technology found it&#8217;s way into refrigeration equipment for leading beverage companies.
The ECR 2, AoFrio&#8217;s most efficient motor design yet, was developed from ground up to be quieter, more reliable, and more efficient than anything else on the market, and fast became the motor of choice for the bottle coolers around the world.

AoFrio spent years mastering the motor. The next challenge was to build a controller unlike anything else in the market. The company took its first steps into the Internet of Things, with SCS Connect: the world&#8217;s first smart connected fleet-management solution, purpose-built for cold drink equipment.
For the first time, beverage brands could track and monitor coolers in the field, with smart telemetry on performance and location.
Between 2016 and 2019, SCS hardware volumes surged, AoFrio had won over 70% market share of the Latin American connected cooler market, and the company moved from selling components to delivering smart technology solutions.

By 2022, IoT and data services were reshaping the business from the inside, and it was time for the name to catch up.
The rebrand took over two years of internal interviews, customer research, and careful thought about what the company stood for, landing on values drawn from our New Zealand roots: transparency, trustworthiness, and environmental responsibility. The name AoFrio was chosen to carry that heritage forward while speaking to a global, multilingual customer base.
With the people who&#8217;d helped build the company, we launched AoFrio with events in New Zealand, Brazil and Mexico – celebrating the next era of innovation.

Connecting a fleet of coolers was the first step. The next opportunity was unlocking the value of connected cooler data at scale and helping beverage brands act on insights to boost ROI. That was the thinking behind AoFrio iQ, our modernised SaaS platform launched in 2024.
With more than a decade of insights gathered from over 3.7million connected coolers, AoFrio’s intelligence platform changes the way beverage brands could oversee their cooler fleets, across everything from commercial performance and sustainability to maintenance and asset management.
Alongside iQ, the SCS range itself grew up. The new SCS 800 brought cellular connectivity built in, no phone or field staff nearby required. Design and intelligence are now the engine of growth for AoFrio.

Every chapter of our story has seen us solve real problems with bold thinking.
The next frontier is intelligence: systems that can reason, predict, and act on what they see. Imagine refrigeration units that flag a fault before it happens and coordinate the fix, or autonomous agents monitoring cooler fleets around the clock, catching stock issues before any human has to intervene. Even sustainable coolers that automatically adjust their own settings to save energy and reduce carbon emissions is within our reach.
If the past forty years taught us anything, it&#8217;s that great people are the key ingredient when it comes to building great technology that drives us forward. Here’s to #40YearsForward.

Interested in working with us? Find out more about us and explore open positions at AoFrio.

#40YearsForward

40 Years Forward

Our
story

Tiny Company, Big Ideas

40
years
forward
in
pictures

Join
the
AoFrio
team

#40YearsForward

40 Years Forward

.css-1ojxgw4{overflow:hidden;padding-bottom:8px;margin-top:-12px;display:inline-block;}Our story

Tiny Company, Big Ideas

40 years forward in pictures

Join the AoFrio team

Our
story

40
years
forward
in
pictures

Join
the
AoFrio
team