You want a unique high-end kitchen and love the heavy-duty, commercial look.
The finishing touch is a statement-making refrigerator. But most luxury fridges look the same or are designed to be hidden behind your cabinets.
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True Refrigerator Introduction
That’s where True Residential comes in. True refrigerators stand out from the crowd.
They have that commercial pro-style look, and their signature heavy duty door hinges scream quality. It’s like having a bank vault for your milk and eggs.
And besides the standard stainless steel, True has 9 custom colors and 6 hardware finishes to choose from so you can personalize it to your liking.
Don’t think of True as this big, bulky restaurant-style fridge sitting in your kitchen. Inside and out, it’s designed to feel like a luxury appliance.
It’s the kind of build quality you have to see and feel in person to get an appreciation for.
In this article, I’ll walk you through the entire True built-in refrigerator line up, including their columns, while breaking down their standout features.
I’ll also cover important design and installation related considerations. And finally, while for the most part True makes a great fridge, there are some reasons why you might want to avoid True altogether, so I’ll include those as well.
Before we go too much further, True might not be a household name… so who is True?
After all, purchasing a built-in fridge is a major investment. Is True a brand new company that could disappear in 5 or 10 years leaving you out of luck? Or will they be around for 10-20 years to support the life of the refrigerator?
True is an American company. It manufactures all of its products in the St. Louis Missouri area.
While True just began manufacturing fridges for residential homes in 2008, it’s been building appliances for grocery stores and restaurants since 1945.
Just go to any convenience store or quick serve restaurant and odds are you’ll see True refrigerators keeping ice cream frozen and soft drinks cold.
They’re the go to choice for all commercial refrigeration applications.
When True designed its residential refrigerators, it kept all the good qualities of its commercial ones and cut out the cons.
True’s Commercial refrigerators get opened non-stop, so True utilizes a forced air system to quickly even out the temperature.
The circulating air helps the items in your fridge come down to temperature quicker meaning fresher food for longer and less spoilage.
This technology is included in all of True built-in residential refrigerators. This also means when you load up your fridge with a warm six pack, it will come down to a refreshing temperature more quickly than in other refrigerators.
While they’re good at keeping things cold, commercial refrigerators can be extremely loud, and for that reason if you ever have the opportunity to get a good deal on a used True commercial fridge and think it’d be a good idea to use in your kitchen, think again! You would find the noise unbearable.
Luckily True made sure their residential refrigerators are extremely quiet.
Although they don’t publish the numbers, informally we’re told they operate in the 42-48db range when the compressor is running, which is very quiet.
True has two different types of built-in refrigeration: Their side by side refrigerator/freezer models, and their stand alone refrigeration columns that you can mix and match.
Side By Side
The side by side models are available in either 42” or 48” widths, with either a solid door or a glass door on the fridge compartment.
They’re available in stainless steel, or, as we mentioned before, you can customize the color and hardware, which is what about 60% of people end up doing.
The glass door is a really nice touch, especially if you like to keep your fridge organized to be able to show off it’s contents… think MTV cribs where celebrities have nicely organized bottles of Fiji water.
Keep in mind, if you do choose a glass door, you’ll miss out on door bins that people normally like to use for quick access items like condamines, jams and milk.
Inside, these fridges have solid, durable-feeling drawers and glass shelves. You really need to see and feel the doors and shelves to understand—but trust me, they’re weighty and solid.
The drawers in the refrigerator are soft close, as are the wire baskets in the freezer, adding a really nice luxury touch.
The entire interior of the fridge is made out of stainless steel, even the control panel buttons. Most other competing fridges have a plastic interior. Not only does the stainless interior look nice, it has practical benefits.
For starters, the stainless steel helps to retain cold. It’s kind of like that heavy cast iron pan you have that retains heat very well on the cooktop. This means less temperature swings and more even temperature throughout the cavity.
Also, stainless steel doesn’t absorb odors the way plastic does. That means True fridges don’t need air filtration—so you get fresher air, and you don’t have to replace any filters.
Inside the freezer you’ll notice something major missing. There’s no ice maker. This can be a deal breaker for a lot of people.
True’s rationale behind this is that ice makers are the number 1 thing that break in normal refrigerators. In sticking to their reliability roots, they opted not to include an ice maker to increase the overall reliability of the fridge.
On the plus side, this frees up a lot of space in the freezer for actual food items. And if you really use ice frequently, True makes a dedicated ice maker that you can install elsewhere in your kitchen.
Like we said before, True also gives you commercial quality forced-air refrigeration.
You also get dual compressors and evaporators for optimal climate control which is a feature you’ll find on most high-end fridges.
Standard single compressor evaporator refrigerators share air between the fridge and freezer which isn’t great. The dual system completely separates the two, creating the ideal dry air for the freezer, to eliminate freezer burn, while providing a more humid environment in the fridge compartment to keep food fresher, longer.
Column Refrigerator
Next is True’s built-in column refrigeration. These columns share all of the same great features as the built-ins we just discussed, including the ability to customize the color and hardware.
But the real benefit of columns is the endless design flexibility.
The columns are available as a 30” or 36” fridge and you can choose from a solid or glass door.
Notably, True’s the only company that offers a glass-door on a fridge column. They also offer a 30” and 36” freezer, a 30” beverage column, and a 30” dual zone wine column.
The beverage column is very unique and customers love seeing this at our showroom. It gives you 4 shelves for storing bottles and cans, 2 pull out wine racks, and a pull out basket which is great for storing open bottles of wine and champagne.
This is great for entertaining. Picture hosting a large party and having all this flexibility to serve your guests.
The 150 bottle dual zone wine column is another show-stopping piece. Each zone can be adjusted from 40 degrees up to 65 degrees, creating the ideal environment for either storing and aging your wines long term or serving them chilled to guests.
It’s one of the only wine storage units to have soft closing full extension shelves. And the internal TruLumina lighting allows you to pick from 14 unique colors to properly showcase your wine collection.
You can combine these columns any way you like and you can even put a column next to one of the side by side built-in fridges we talked about earlier.
True makes an accessory toe kick and grill that allows you to cohesively blend 2 to 3 units together.
One of the most popular combinations we see is wall of refrigeration idea, combining a 30” freezer column, 30” refrigerator column, and 30” wine column.
A similar concept they used is a 48” side by side fridge next to a 30” wine column.
We also really like centering your range and flanking it with a fridge on one side, freezer on the other. I’m not sure how practical this is, but it definitely makes a statement.
The possibilities are endless. True also makes a full line of undercounter and outdoor refrigeration products.
Cons of True Refrigerators
We’ve talked up all the great things about True. Now let’s hit on some of the reasons you might NOT want a True fridge.
We want you to have the full picture before you make a decision. After all, it’s a big investment.
#1 True is missing some key features, including an ice maker. True knows from experience what makes a fridge break down, and that includes ice makers and water dispensers.
So you won’t get a built-in ice maker or a filtered water dispenser on a True fridge, never mind bells and whistles like Wi-Fi, a camera, or a touch screen.
If one of those is a must-have for you, you’ll want to look elsewhere. But the lack of an ice maker can be solved by installing a dedicated undercounter ice maker, which by the way True makes one of the best on the market.
#2 You have to love the commercial look. This is not a fridge that’s going to blend into your kitchen or hide behind a custom cabinetry panel. True doesn’t even make panel-ready full-size fridges, nor do they plan to.
But that’s the whole point: A True fridge is supposed to make a statement. We find True works better with Farmhouse style or Traditional style kitchens more so than contemporary modern designs.
#3 You can’t get a fully flush installation with True. More and more of customers are requesting a fully flush installation. This is when the front of the fridge is perfectly flush with the front of your surrounding cabinets.
A fridge that is installed flush doesn’t stick out and has a cleaner look. With True, the hinges and door will always protrude past the cabinets, which some people don’t like, especially with applications where you’re installing it next to flush installed wall ovens.