SolarFrost consists of two entities, first the Austrian SolarFrost Research and Development Ltd., a privately owned research company dealing with the development of alternative cooling machines with special features:

• SolarFrost cooling machines are powered by solar energy or other cheap, low temperature energy sources such as waste heat or district heating.
• The required electrical energy input (eg for pumps) is extremely low.
• SolarFrost cooling machines are small and simple to build.
• The required material is cheap and available everywhere.
• SolarFrost cooling machines have a long life expectancy.

Second there is SolarFrost Labs in Australia, at the moment preparing the start of industrial production of icebooks and coordinating business worldwide.

The origin of SolarFrost was a development aid co-operation project in 1996 between Austria and Tanzania. Dr. Gerhard Kunze, Professor of Applied Physics, was confronted with the challenge to develop a solar refrigeration system for milk. The chiller should work without electricity, be easy to build and economical enough to allow local people to afford it without foreign loans. For political reasons the project was cancelled and the machine could never be implemented in Tanzania.

Dr. Kunze was aware of the potential of solar cooling and continued the research work in the Group for Appropriate Technology (GrAT) - partly funded by the Austrian Ministry of Science. Several prototypes were built and a first sophisticated computer modelling software was developed.

In 2001 the company SolarFrost was founded, financed by a fund from Hong Kong, supporting environmentally friendly projects.