Three Thousand Five Hundred Dollars and a Beverage Cooler: The Origins of Amana Appliances
Near Amana Colonies, Iowa
Out of the Great Change came, improbably, one of the most recognized appliance brands in the world. The story begins with a traveling salesman named George C. Foerstner, who sold goods for the Amana woolen mill in the years after the reorganization of nineteen thirty-two.
In nineteen thirty-three, the repeal of Prohibition created a sudden demand for commercial beverage coolers. Foerstner recognized the opportunity. In nineteen thirty-four he started the Electric Equipment Company in the village of Middle Amana, investing three thousand five hundred dollars of his own savings.
The company built beverage coolers for restaurants and taverns. Two years later he sold the company to the Amana Society, which renamed it the Electrical Department of the Amana Society and kept him on as manager. From those beverage coolers, the company expanded into chest freezers, then into home refrigerators.
In nineteen forty-seven Amana introduced one of its first freezers built for home use. In nineteen sixty-seven the company introduced the Radarange, the first countertop microwave oven, selling it for four hundred ninety-five dollars at a time when most microwaves cost thousands. The brand was eventually sold to Raytheon and later to Whirlpool, which still owns it today.
The name Amana, from a Hebrew word meaning to remain faithful, now appears on kitchen appliances across the country, inherited from a communal religious community that once shared fifty-five kitchens and cooked no individual meals at all.
