Brands? There are a lot fewer than you might think. Basically, three companies make almost all of the chest freezers sold in North America. These are: Frigidaire which owns a variety of brands (like Kelvinator, White Westinghouse) and also makes freezers for big-box store house brands plus some of the freezers sold under GE and Kenmore brands. I've been told by Sears salepeople that Frigidaire makes the large capacity chest freezers sold as Kenmores. Whirlpool: bought the WC Woods factory in Canada out of a bankruptcy liquidation in 2009, and has continued production. Sold under Whirlpool's various brand names (Amana, Kitchenaid, Maytag) plus some odd brands it owns (Admiral) plus some brands like Danby, Crosley, etc. Haier: selling under its own name plus a variety of brands for big box stores plus the rest of what GE and Kenmore sell. Haier has had some intermittent quality control and warranty service issues on some products but a scan of ConsumerAffairs.Com did not turn up any complaints about their chest feezers. Some of them apparently are assembled in North or South Carolina. Consumer Reports membership survey results do not report on long term reliability and problem rates for chest freezers. CR's product performance ratings favor Whirlpool and Frigidaire branded chest freezers. The buying advice is pretty much look for features (like lights) and energy consumption, and buy whatever has the best price. I bought a small (5 cu ft) Firgidaire about 16 years ago (from Costco, IIRC). Near as I can tell, it is essentially the same small model that Frigidaire is still selling. According to the Kill-a-Watt meter, the old one consumes about 2% more power than the current models are supposed to use, at least according to the DOE tags in the store models. (Consumer Reports cautions that their testing has shown that the ratings are an average of 17% low. Maybe they test the freezers differently than I do or maybe the current sealed sysmes and motors aren't so good.) Never had a hint of problem with Firigidare chest unit and it is still going strong for a friend of mine. We had a 9 hour power outage a couple of years back. When the power came back, my friend dropped in a probe thermometer and found internal temps were still -4F. I'm told they'll go for days without power. I'd still be using that Frigidaire except that I needed larger capacity and only had room to get it in the basement by going taller. That's how I wound up with 14 cu ft Firgidaire upright. I find it a lot more convenient to get at things in the upright but at the price of a lot more noise (which I did not expect) and power consumption (which I did expect.) The Kill-a-Watt meter tells me the upright is using about three times the power of the old chest freezer. This post was edited by JWVideo on Sun, May 5, 13 at 19:53

Betty, thanks for posting that question. It's one that my husband and I are in the midst of debating right now. Our chest freezer is probably more than 30 years old. It's only been used for about 20 of those 30 years, though. I'm not much on leaning into it, and it really takes some doing to keep from losing stuff at the bottom of it. Sometimes I'd love an upright. At the same time, I know it's more energy efficient (even a 30 year old model) than an upright. So I've dealt with that over the years. DonnaR/CA

I know nothing about commercial chest freezers, but we just bought a small residential (5 cu ft) chest freezer (though we're actually using it as a fridge). DH looked at almost all of them in person and was convinced that with one or two exceptions, they were all manufactured by the same maker and simply rebranded and trimmed out differently. (He was looking at the guts and measuring everything, and found it all very consistent, from sizes to materials.) I want to say Samsung and one of the European makers were the exceptions. So we got the cheapest one (Frigidaire, I think). It's been fine so far, but we've only had it a month. Not sure if that helps much...

I currently have an upright freezer, and will be getting a 6.9 cu ft chest freezer next week. Sometimes the upright has been a pain to organize, so I'm glad to hear about solutions for the chest one. I do use sharpies to label contents, month & year. I'm thinking plastic bins, I like the idea of different colors. I did buy small plastic bins for the upright, as items had a nasty habit of sliding out and onto the floor. The idea of the app seems at least worth the try, tho I doubt I'll last long with it. Most apps are free or real cheap... (I will be raising meat chicken, and I already purchase half pigs, so space is essential. It is also great for freezing home made sauces that should not be water bath canned.) So anyhow, thanks for the ideas!