Business View Magazine | July 2019

241 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JULY 2019 BVM: Can you give us some background on KoolJet? Wasir: “We are in business 18 years. I started this company with another gentleman in 2001. He eventually retired and Pat became a major shareholder in 2016. Now, Pat and I are partners. Kooljet originally started in Tillsonburg, Ontario, moved down the road to Delhi for a few years, then back to Tillsonburg, and we just moved to Brantford in November 2018. For many years, we were doing a certain kind of work and now we have a much bigger building with new presses, all new CNC machinery and our process is slowly becoming more automated. We have some big contracts under our belts and we’re trying to bring the company to the next level. The building is 100,000 sq. ft. but we’re only using one third of the facility, and leasing out the other two thirds. So, when we need to expand the room will be there. “We have 18 employees, including office staff. Most of them have been with us a long time, some from day one. When we moved, 70 to 80 percent of them came with us. The rest, we hired locally and we are still in the process of hiring more. We do design, engineering, and manufacturing of units. Nothing is off the shelf. We go to the customer to learn their needs and then we design a specific system for them.” BVM: Is it true there’s a particularly chilling story about a tuna freezer? Wasir: “Yes. We have customers in the fisheries sector that we’ve supplied freezers to in the past. The units are usually designed for minus 18 degrees F. but, in 2009, we custom-designed a freezer for tuna fish that the client, Japan Foods in Mississauga, wanted to maintain at minus 76 degrees. It’s been successfully running for ten years now. That’s the lowest temperature we’ve done so far. When you go in that room, even your eyes freeze, it’s so cold. We couldn’t make it as a freestanding building with those deep temperatures, so this room was made inside a cold room that had an ambient temperature of about minus 20 degrees. Then, we built the tuna room for minus 76. We had to use a split- KOOLJET