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Tunnel Freezers Help Ice Cream Company Chill Out When Demand Heats Up

Totally Cool improves throughput while growing its business with help from Air Products freezers.

Ice cream cakes Totally Cool Baltimore
Totally Cool produces 800,000 to 1.5 million ice cream cakes, pints, and cups per month at its 42,000-sq-ft plant in Owings Mills, Md., northwest of Baltimore.
Totally Cool

Shoppers buying store-branded ice cream cakes and frozen novelties might think those desserts were made onsite by retail staff, but depending on the location, there’s a chance they were manufactured offsite by Totally Cool. For more than 25 years, the Baltimore-area company has created ice cream cakes, pints, and cups for private-label and wholesale clients across the U.S.

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Totally Cool was founded by CEO and President Mike Uhlfelder in 1992. Inspired by his work at a Carvel ice cream manufacturing and retail store when he was 15, he funneled that passion into his own company seven years later. Uhlfelder’s business model as a co-manufacturer and private label partner took off quickly, and by 2003, demand for his ice cream cakes—Totally Cool’s core product—was exceeding his ability to produce them.

“We could not get enough throughput,” says Uhlfelder. “At the time [our ice cream cakes] went into specific molds for different sizes. Then those cakes went into a blast freezer, which is static freezing, so our turnaround time to further process that product was 24 hours. The next day we would take the cake out of the molds, and decorate, package, and finish them. So, we had a huge lag time, and the only way we could get ahead was to freeze items instantaneously, like 20 to 30 minutes as opposed to 24 hours. That’s why we bought our first tunnel freezer.”

Frozen ice cream cakes factory Totally Cool BaltimoreAir Products’ tunnel freezers have helped Totally Cool meet increased demand for its ice cream products—like these cakes—while alleviating production bottlenecks due to faster freezing with nitrogen.Totally Cool

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