Temperature Monitoring with Dan Blessing of ABW Innovation

In this episode, we chat to Dan Blessing of ABW Innovation in relation to temperature  monitoring and alarms. Our industry lives and dies by temperatures, so Dan shares some valuable information on how to take care of your equipment and your ice cream.

For more information on ABW innovations go to:

• https://www.abw-innovations.com
• https://www.abw-innovations.com/products

For information about the North American Ice Cream Assoc, and how you can open and grow your ice cream business with a community that will support you, go to https://icecreamassociation.org/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey there, folks. Welcome to the Ice Cream Podcast. It's the official podcast of the North American Ice Cream Association. Where you know the tagline. We're all about ice cream people, helping ice cream people. We're very excited to talk to Dan Blessing today. I tell people he's the most he's the smartest man in the ice cream industry. I don't know whether that's true or not, but in my mind and heart it is. How are you, Dan? Doing very good. Thank you, Steve. That's good. It's interesting. Whenever we start, before we press record, when we have a guest on, we always like to have a little bit of a chit-chat leading up to. And I feel as though I've just kind of gone through Dan's roller coaster life before we even I said, no, let's let's not lose any of the magic. Let's uh let's press record and see where it goes. Um Dan uh ABW, uh, for those uh who have been to ConeCon uh or have had dealings with a customer uh with we'll we'll get into ABW because as you mentioned, I'm gonna steal your line. You've been saving people's businesses every day. Um let's talk a little bit about the road that brought you to the ice cream industry, because it is a a long and winding road full of adventure. Give me give me the cliff note version of uh of where where you're from, I guess, originally and how you ended up where you are.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Well, I was born and raised in DeKelba, Illinois, about 60 miles west of Chicago. And um yes, the the path to the ice cream industry was quite long, but uh in my life um uh I studied into electronics quite a bit, uh, which led to security and having security companies, a couple of those that were bought out. I was in law enforcement for some time. At the same time, I owned the security companies, uh, which led into another company I had for 30 years. We built car washes all over the nation and supplied them, uh over 10,000 accounts, and uh it was quite large. And when that company got bought out, I thought I would do something different, and different it was. At that time, we were living in uh Alabama and uh packed up, moved to Maui, and had a concept, an idea that we had tested, and thus created Island Cream Company. And um, in short order, it exploded because we had a very unique idea and concept that took off. And being in the ice cream industry, I immediately learned a couple things. One, I couldn't believe that there was not a way to automatically shape an ice cream cone. That standing there and shaping a cone every day uh was not for me, and it sure wasn't for my staff. So I thought I'll buy one. I searched the world over and there wasn't one. Well, having a background in designing systems and electronics, we built one and thus the cone genie was born.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

So the cone genie was the first the first of ABW's iterations per se. That's that's correct. Can I jump back? Can can I jump back? You mentioned to me a story I I do think it's worth bringing up. That that you built an alarm system, like a burglar alarm system, when you were like 12 or 13.

unknown 3:16

Right.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

You rode your bike down to Dairy Queen and pitched this to the Dairy Queen franchisee. Tell us about that.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Yeah, that's basically it. I uh I had a neighbor who was handicapped, and I would spend time with him every day, and I learned electronics from him. He literally ran a business and I would assist him. And um, and being always interested in law enforcement and security, I immediately started learn learning circuits and how to make what we would call a door enunciator. You know, you open the door, instead of having a bell that rings on the door, do it electronically. And so I started doing a few of those. But I got really interested in alarm systems, so I started building from scratch, relays, the board, everything, not really knowing because I was so young that there is an ice cream industry where I could buy alarm panels that were pre-made. Okay, made it myself. And uh at that point, my dad being in business, I'd been putting door enunciators and other businesses. Well, I was excited. Look, man, I'm gonna go put this alarm in. So I got on my bike, drove around, cold calling. By the way, with a business card that I made myself in printing class in junior high, we had a little printing press. And uh, so I gave that out, and I I couldn't believe that this guy at the Dairy Queen would listen to me. And I went to my little spiel and he said, Let's do it. And I to this day I can remember it was six hundred and forty dollars, and we're talking nineteen seventy, probably seventy-four, seventy-five.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Man, that must have been quite a pitch for I don't know what two thousand two thousand twenty-six dollars they are now. It's gotta be thousands.

SPEAKER_01 4:52

Right. And he I couldn't believe he did it. So I got everything together. I had to have my mom drive me to the Dairy Queen. Took me three days to install something that would have taken me four hours today. Okay. And uh worked great. And sure enough, two weeks later, one morning, about six in the morning, the phone rings, because of course I had my little decals I put on the window too to tell them who did the alarm. Okay, the police department called, and they wanted to talk to the owner of DB Alarms. And my mom runs up the steps and wakes me up, and I was scared to death. What does the police want? And they told me, we're trying to reach the owner at the Dairy Queen. Somebody attempted to break in and the alarm scared him off. And of course, I didn't know that I should keep the owner's name and phone number back then. So they reached him. Shorter the story was it became public right away in the paper that this little kid put in an alarm and saved the place from being broken into, and from that point on, um, it was addicted to law enforcement and security and alarms from that point forward.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

Mate, that's a great, great story. Um and interestingly, I always love the background of where does this drive for entrepreneurialism come through? And it sounds like you know, your dad had businesses and so forth. Honestly, the thing that we have in common is our service and the police. I was in 13 years, and I didn't I never thought myself as being overly entrepreneurial, but I do remember the point where I was out in a car driving around, uh, I don't know, two o'clock in the morning or whatever. And I came back to the station and there was the sergeant sitting there reading the paper. And I thought to myself, I'm out here busting my buns, trying to do the right thing, trying to keep the community safe. He's in here reading a paper, he's getting paid exactly the same as me. Why can't I do something that's going to benefit the hard work that I put in? And I think that's what drives a lot of people to entrepreneurial entrepreneurialism is hey, if you've got an idea or you're willing to work, then that's what generates revenue, not just, oh well, I can just sit in the office today or I can go out and bust my buns doing something, and but someone else is getting the same on the same rank or same level as me. And um, yeah, so that that that's what drove me out of the police and into what, you know, obviously the long and windy road of Steve Christians' business process, but um it's a pretty interesting process, no?

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Well, yeah, and uh the interesting part at that time I was in Illinois and my parents had moved to New Orleans, so I moved down there, and uh it's a long story. I was also a cadet with the Caleb County Sheriff's Police starting at about 14, and I was in charge of that program, and we had a very successful program. So I always thought I was gonna stay there forever. And uh well, they moved, and I went down later, and and believe it or not, man, I could be a cop in Louisiana at 18, and I was gonna go to college for that, and I said, Man, I I can learn more on the street. So I became a cop down there at 18, and my push to go into alarms, start the alarm companies in New Orleans area was survival. Uh, as a cop in New Orleans that time, you made $600 a month. Okay. So every guy I worked with was starving. So I started an alarm company. We were literally doing three and four homes a week, and I would hire deputies off duty as my installers, and uh we would do them all over the place. So, yes, does that spirit to do businesses grown with that, and it's never stopped. I've had many businesses I haven't even mentioned to you. Um, but that grew, and um you know, but survival was always the initial real instinct there.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

Well, that and again, that's probably what drives a lot of entrepreneurs is survival. You don't know what to do, you'll you'll bootstrap it together with duct tape and super glue and hopefully make a little bit of money. Mate, um I can tell you from personal experience that uh and I've said this to must be thousands of people in the ice cream industry, you live by temperature, you die by temperature. And we have a facility here in St. Louis that um we have freezers full of product, we have dipping cabinets, uh, we have blast freezers and so forth. Um and there have been many, many times where um ABW innovations, either a f either a a text or an email or a phone call, um, and even a a call from the president of operations at ABW to see what we're doing here and whether we're aware of stuff going on, um, has saved our bacon. Um tell me a little bit about well, tell me about this process of um helping people in in really monitoring temperature, because we are in an industry where our product line is so fickle and and one or two degrees can be the difference between a great product and a terrible product. And understanding that is really important. So tell us a little bit about you know some of the stuff that you do in order to help people all around the country, all around the world.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Well, the foundation to the what we call the shop century system. Again, we started out making a product, uh, as I said, the cone genie out of necessity. Well, I was in the owning an island cream company in New Orleans, excuse me, in Maui, immediately, short order. I found out, man, that's a lot of product, a lot of money. Things happen uh between employee mistakes and equipment failures, and with my background in electronic security, I immediately had the access to build a system that I put in. And it monitors our equipment and did great. And as I began to look at the industry and uh see what's going on, I realized no one is really doing this real well, meaning we could be so far advanced, even beyond what's available. Uh so I started studying that industry, and uh through a process of events, uh partnerships with some people, because I had some patents, other people had patents, there's licenses involved. I thought if I could make the best system, and that's what we ended up doing through through different arrangements, and uh that is the birth of the shop century. So uh going from monitoring a temperature now to we can do things that blow people's minds. But you know, it's it's so much more than monitoring temperature. Uh, and if there's one thing I've learned, I've always told my staff of every company I've owned, there's two rules to life, I believe, that lead to success. One, do not go beyond your scope of authority and don't go beyond your scope of knowledge. And unfortunately, we have so many people in this internet age that they'll read something that they agree with and think that's truth. And it that is so applicable, they're beyond their scope of knowledge when it comes to how to monitor equipment in the ice cream industry or food. Because we deal with food people all over the nation. Right. And I immediately realized I'm gonna call them the Amazon specials. Anything you can find in Amazon Monitor Temperature, they are not the products that are gonna protect your livelihood. They might be good to protect a turkey and a roast in your home refrigerator, but there's so much more to truly protecting an ice cream operation. And uh it's grown to a point where the features, you know, when we talk about features, so we have 30, 40, 50 features, those are all designed by necessity of owners when we realize, all right, how are you going to monitor the temperature of a unit, but yet avoid uh detection every time they open a door and eliminate an alert when there's a defrost cycle? And what do you do about the deliveries? And what do you do about the dipping cabinets to get defrost on a regular schedule? So literally, we went and made a system that covers everything. You don't want to get what we call alert fatigue, whether going off every time something happens, or the system is unreliable. So our system is uh fully supervised. That means no component in the system can quit working without you knowing about it. Uh it self-checks continually, whether that's the batteries, which last for years, um, the transmission, the range, and we ended up making the strongest radio transmitting equipment in the industry for this type of product right now. We can go over 2,000 foot through walls and it's encrypted, military, it's not Bluetooth, it's not Wi-Fi. Uh, I would highly caution people to stay away from that, and I could go through an hour presentation of why that's not compatible in equipment operations. It's just not made for commercial, besides all the other operations. But it's been amazing. You know, it's uh how we've helped people.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

When I when I first came to the country, I was working with a lot of um ice cream franchisees and franchise oars, and they had something called the Red Book, and that Red Book was they would go and put a probe thermometer in hoppers, they put a probe thermometer in the um ornament rail, um, because there was really no other way, you know, whatever that was, 22 years ago, in order to really kind of monitor from even from a food safety standpoint. So you know, they'd fill out this book three times a day because the franchise all wanted them to fill it out. Um and that's kind of what I feel is um one of those things whereby I mean there's a number of reasons why you should be monitoring temperature of your product. Um food safety is one of them, but um even kind of equipment longevity and so forth. But um it really does take the take take the the worry out of hey, am I um do I as my condiment rail that has strawberries and blueberries and raspberries and everything that's temperature sensitive, um should I be monitoring this? Should I be putting a pro thumb on it? Should I be recording this? And I know from our system where we can log into the portal and I can see where my dipping cabinets at and where my freezers are at for the last hour, for the last day, for the last year. Um do health departments do do do your customers really um look at that as one of the big aspects so far as food safety and helping health departments or at least proving to health proving to health departments that no, I can prove to you that this temperature rack never gay uh never came over 40 or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Oh yes. You you you've hit on an item that I have about seven answers for because you don't realize the magnitude of what you just said. Is the safety part paramount? Yes, it is, but it goes beyond that. Right now we're seeing in many parts of the nation they are requiring that every owner go to every cooling piece of equipment every two hours with a log and manually check temperatures. Well, that's so unrealistic, okay, and time consuming. Well, our system automatically does that. So, yes, we're watching the safety aspect, taking the work away and having a log. And uh other things that are built into the system, such as even if you lost internet and didn't have a cellular system with us. We offer both that continually run. Sensors continually monitor anyway. And as soon as you reconnect, it comes back up. So we have many restaurant chains that'll be able to go in after an eight-hour outage and look at every cooler and say, hey, man, we we never even went over 42, and we sure didn't have the two-hour violation, and they have documentation to see you know what's going on. But the biggest thing, Steve, that you hit on that blows everyone's mind with our system when they get it is what they learn about their equipment. I don't care what you how you think your system's operating, how it's cooling, how it's programmed, when you can get in there and truly see it detailed down to the minute, all of a sudden you learn things about your equipment you didn't know. And it's so fun empowering people and giving them the tools to go in and really see how it's operating. And of course, the the old golden ticket we tell people is you learn right away that the digital display on your refrigerator freezer is not accurate. And there's a reason health departments don't pay attention to it. So we train people on that and get them into the mode of finding out what their temperature really is and you know how you should have it set and programmed. And so you've hit on a lot there, but yes, that's it's all very important part of it.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

Well, and another thing that you mentioned too, which I don't think a lot of people um I don't know whether I I'm sure you sell it, but this process of, yeah, you may not be getting alerts, but if your holding temperature on average is slowly increasing, is there not a um uh a danger of hey up my compressor's slowly going out?

SPEAKER_01 17:30

Oh, yes. Steve, we we do a lot of net, a couple things. Again, you're hitting on some good points. We have recently even made a new algorithm in our host system. We call it super alerts. So most people in theory can understand, hey, I've got a temperature sensor, I'm running at 10, I want to know if it hits 20. You know, whatever it is that you're looking for. We do different than that. We study the history of its cooling and can determine when you've broke that pattern. Now, yes, we still have alerts at given temperatures. And by the way, our system can have an unlimited amount of alerts. It's not just one temperature. We can literally have 20, 30 on one unit for different situations. But the super alerts will look at it and say, Whoop, you've just broke the cooling pattern. Historically, of what you've done, we call that a slow growth. So, picture with me if you would. If you were looking at a graph right now of a walk-in cooler that always ran at negative 10, and you wanted an alert at 15 degrees, for example, and you've picked 15 because uh you've got a defrost cycle that pushes it up to 10, let's say every six or eight hours, and you've got a filling schedule, things like that. That's fine. And people do that all day long, and that may be appropriate for your location. But a super alert goes in there and says, Look, you're always running at negative five degrees, and we know that we can put what's called a zero super alert in there with a specific time delay that you've never broken or should not break. So, what happens, we're saving people right now, they'll get an alert at zero degrees, and they'll call and say, Dan, what is this super alert? And I said, you know, because we're training them, this has been out about six, eight weeks now, and say, we're detecting a change in the operation of your freezer that's broken the historic pattern way in advance. And sure enough, we're telling people two days in advance. I have pictures of graphs I can show you where we're you'll have someone operating, and here's this slow growth going over three days of just growing. Well, that's what we detect because they're still 20 degrees away from an alert. Right. So we catch it, and it's it's catching people and saving them in ways, giving them ample time to get repairs, even while it stays cold or move product way in advance.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

So do you see trends around the the country? I mean, you're pulling all of this data from temperature. Um, can you tell from the data that hey uh Arkansas having a particularly hot day today, or is there is there ancillary information that you've kind of can pick up?

SPEAKER_01 20:10

Um the first thing that comes to mind when you say that, this year we're seeing more equipment outages than we have ever seen in history. Let me give you an example. We've had one brand new customer start three weeks ago, their very first week they put it in, ten days apart, two complete equipment failures, saved them on everything. Another customer had one go out every week for a month. We're seeing every day major outage, and people say, Man, we just can't keep up. And let me say, it isn't just all old equipment, some of it's brand new. And uh, you know, one of the things that people underestimate, if I sat here and said, let's take the most basic reach-in freezer and just look at the things that can go wrong on it. Most people say, uh, the you know, compressor might go out, or you know, the door's gonna be left open. Well, look at it from our perspective. We see, let me tell you in a quick chain here, because I could get long. All right. You told me, you told me to keep you targeted. I mean, I would just say it starts from the breaker panel all the way through the outlet, through the cord, through every connection, all the way through to every component, and many components have 50 items in them. Any one of those things. And then the list is long. Yeah, you go down, and that's what we see. So it's really amazing. Um, I think people sometimes have a tendency to wish and hope and underestimate the risk. But we know from dealing with people that the loss of product and losing it all is a big deal. I mean, just you know, many times your suppliers don't even have enough to replenish. You're gonna take days or weeks to build up the stock again. The downtime, the wear and tear in your staff. So it's a big deal. It's a big deal.

SPEAKER_00 21:56

Dan, I get people asking me uh a lot too about should I get a generator. At my store. My stock answer is that hey, if you're getting power going out every year, if you're in the Gulf states or you've got real hurricane um issues, then um yeah, potentially you could look at a generator. Um but that's where I kind of say, well, you really just need to have some temperature monitoring. Um but do you find that more and more stores are using that kind of extra step of backup to go to generators?

SPEAKER_01 22:29

Yeah, you've hit the second nail on the head. When I talk about seeing more equipment outages, Steve, we're seeing more power outages and longer this year than ever. And um we are increasingly telling people to consider generators. And you know, many times they they think big, and if you can afford big, that's fine. But there's many simple ways and math to narrow it down to five, six coolers and be prepared. As long as you have the right alarm notification, like the shop century, we're gonna tell you when you lose AC power at your building. It gives you the ample time to get there and set it up. For example, our island cream shop in Hawaii, uh, we've been gone uh off as much as three days before, but we will have an outage average two to four times per year. So we've got a host setup and configuration on a portable generator that ends up running 10 freezers and has kept us going. We've never had a loss of product. But you've got to have a plan in place and you've got to be ready to implement it.

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Yeah, yeah, I 100% agree. Hey, interestingly, our let me add one point, Steve.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Let me just add one point. Right away when people hear me say something like that, a shop that can run and protect 10 units, narrow it down to 10, I mean, double and sing almost all double reach in freezers that would store stuff. What's that cost? And again, this is a do-it-yourself. Just the generator system. We use a dual fuel there. You can get those for sixteen hundred dollars. We then got tired of running the extension cords, so we put a transfer switch in. That was another thousand dollars. 2600 bucks. We basically almost automated the transfer. Now, I say almost because you still got to wheel the generator there, take the big power cable, connect it to, but then the staff just flips breakers and it transferred automatically because this was happening so often. So people that are listening and wondering, is this something I can afford? Yes. A basic store for $1,500 to $2,500 could have a very good generator system, and it'll more than pay for itself the very first time that you need to use it.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

Do you have do you have an idea of kind of brand and voltage and amperage that most stores are using? Or that you would recommend.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

I know you're not a generator guy, but yeah, it it it really needs to be spec to each store. There's some that can do it small, and it's simple. We're glad to help somebody. We'll tell them how to do it. And and those uh charts for that are available online, they're real simple. You just figure out the wattage and how many units, and it's pretty simple, but we're glad to walk people through that. We do it all the time. And um it's easy. And in fact, many of these components are available at your Home Depots. Maybe not the transfer switch, but they're readily available online also, if you want to make it where it's faster to convert. But again, many people get one generator and get splits and run off with extension cords, and you're in business.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

Yeah. And I was gonna say, I don't know what percentage of alerts that that you guys send to me. And in my mind, in my mind, when I get an alert, I see you and it's 11 o'clock at night, and you're sitting at a switchboard, and you there's a red light flashing saying, Steve's in trouble, and you're type I know it's probably a little bit more high-tech than that, but in my heart of hearts, that's what I'd like to believe is happening out there at ABW. But what I was gonna say was there are so many times where I turn my blast freezer off, and I just in in my mind, I think I should just jump onto the app and and pause that. Pause it. But I don't. I don't sometimes We see that, Steve. We know. Sometimes it's a test to see whether Dan's really uh at the switchboard, and you've never let us down.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

Uh let me let me answer that real quick. Everything is fully automated. I hate to use the word AI because it's getting overplayed a little bit, but everything we do is automated run by computers, all the way down to every phone call, notification, email, text, through all the list of your workers, all the documentation. But you did hit on a key point. One thing that ABW does different is every time an alert goes off, if you're getting an alert, besides our automation, besides a big control board that we can see everything on, an email is sent to our team. It's going across someone's desk. We call that the hot desk. So when when Steve gets that alert, an actual person's looking at it and we just review your account. Why do you get that? What's going on? Did he acknowledge it? Ah, Steve had three of those this week. There's and that's during business hours. Something's going on. We need to change that alert, we need to add some time to talk to him so we can avoid that alert. So we send emails to people and say, hey, here's what we've done. We believe this is during normal routine business. We're tweaking your rule to avoid that. If you disagree, let us know. But so, yes, in one sense, human eyes are seeing every alert, even though it runs itself. Everything, you ain't counting on a person sleeping at a desk. But that's how we provide the best service really putting hands on and using a head and say, hold it. We can see history here. That that's happened four times in two weeks. We need to change that.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

Well, let me tell you, I know personally, and again, we we're not we're not running here, you know, 24 hours a day. Well, we're running 24 hours a day. We don't have retail here 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We do have a lot of product here. And um temperature monitoring has saved our bacon many, many times. And I don't even know, I'd even hate to think the dollar value, not not only the potential revenue lost, but the dollar value we've even just A, my time and and labor. Secondly, the the food cost that's gone into it, let alone the potential revenue that we could have got. So it's it's when you think about you know, we try not to kind of fear monger in worst case scenario, but when you think about worst case scenario where you lose a walk-in freezer full of, you know, a hundred tubs of ice cream. It's terrible. It happens. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

Um let me let me make one other quick and little announcement I almost forgot about. You'll be the first to know, really. Um, you know, we've had the cone genie now since 2017. Within about two weeks, we're releasing the cone genie junior because you know, the original cone genie, it's it is a more expensive item because we made the very best we possibly could. So we have another version coming out that's gonna be more affordable and we're excited about it, and keep your eyes open, and it's gonna allow a lot of other shops to get in at a much lower dollar mark and still have automated cone production.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

We we even we've skipped over the cone genie. Um and maybe that's another podcast, but does Trish sense from Half Pike Creamery get any commis or kickback for the amount of cone genies she has influenced people to buy? She has got such good video of just cranking down that line, cranking out the line.

SPEAKER_01 29:36

She's a very smart person, she's very dedicated, and I'm gonna be very candid. She is the one person we sent the cone genie junior to for her review. She's been using it, we got it back. And um, I'm not gonna say what she had to say, I'll let her speak her known because we haven't gone public yet. But um, no, she doesn't make any money or commission on that. But her expertise is great. You know, I'm gonna be the first to admit, because of the dollar amount on the original cone genie, that this unit's really reserved for people that have high volume. Right. And we designed it for that. An average person, unless they have a an issue, a handicap issue where it's difficult to make a cone and you need automation. We literally walk away from cells and tell people, hey, if you don't have two, three, four irons and you're looking to make a bunch, this isn't really for you. We're looking for the people that have a high volume, they want to make as many as they can, great consistency. And uh she is one of them. So you can watch her videos as they go around and she'll line up four irons, and man, she kicks them out. You know, and it's kind of like island cream. That's what we did at our shop where we ran this, where it was born. Ireland cream was making them that way for several well, a couple years before we went public. And we'll run three or four irons, and it's meant to kick out high volume of cones.

SPEAKER_00 30:49

So, what I got from that story, Dan, is I'm not the first person to find out about the uh cone genie junior. Trish has known about this for weeks.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Well, yes, yes, that is true. She's my a resident expert.

SPEAKER_00 31:03

Oh, that's good. Well, she does some great oh, she's she's done some great, yeah, uh great influence in our and I'm proud to say that she has chopped century bear, and we have saved her many times also.

SPEAKER_01 31:13

She'd be the first to tell you that. And it's uh been a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_00 31:15

Well, mate, let me tell you one final story. Let me tell you one final story. I love sharing this with people that I that I uh talk to about. So I was down here at our facility, and my daughter Katie was making ice cream. And um we have a number of different batch freezers, some are air cooled, some are water cooled. I went down to the shop to get some milk and bananas. That's what ice cream people do. They go down to the shops to buy some milk and bananas. I'm in the car on the way back and I get the water alert go off on my phone. Now we in Missouri we have uh terrible freezing problems, freezing pipes. We don't have a snow problem, we've got an ice and freezing problem. So I have one of the ABW water sensors underneath my three compartment sink. Well, I guess while she was moving a cart around, she bumped the outlet hose from our water cool batteries that went down the drain, knocked it out, and there was water on the floor. And so the water alarm went off. So I'll get this text, there's water on the floor. And I'm five minutes away, so I'm like, oh, okay, Katie's there, what's going on? So anyway, she's frantically mopping up the water. I get there, and uh I say, What's going on in here? And she goes, What what what are you talking about? I said, There was water on the floor. She said, How did you know there was water on the floor? Because I got on alert to say there was water on the floor. She thought she'd got away with it, Dan, but she never did.

SPEAKER_01 32:43

Well, you know, you hit on a point, and I'll just hit it for a second. It's important to understand with the shop center, we make over 80 different sensors. Let me tell you what we do for some places, Steve. We can literally monitor single phase, three-phase the equipment. We have many people. We put monitors on a compressor. We can tell you before temperature even hits. We can monitor the load of how a compressor is operating, and if it changes, we let you know. So we literally can do motion detectors, door detectors, voltage sensing. Uh, we can monitor anything. We literally have devices that will put in plants. They want to know the pH, the salinity, anything you want to do in any way, shape, or form. For example, many of the ice cream shops that have water sensors like yours will also add our water cutoff, and we literally shut off the water main to the building when we detect water and stop them from flooding. And uh, we have many sites that we save from a broken water line overnight, and they come in, and all they have is a small little pool of water to clean up because we shut off the water line. So the AD sensors allow us to literally we can monitor tank levels. We have some ice cream shops that will make simple syrup, pump it to an attic full of the tank full, and we can tell them the levels of the tank and send their staff text when it's time to make more because it's running low. So, you know, there's there's a lot of different things we can do.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

The smartest man in the ice cream industry, Dan blessing. Um Dan, really appreciate you spending some time. Again, I think it's well worth, if you have any questions, um stop by the um the booth at ConeCon. Um Dan's always been a big supporter and sponsor of the show, and so we really appreciate your involvement and your process of helping ice cream people. Where can people find out more about ABW, Dan?

SPEAKER_01 34:32

Well, the easiest is our website, which is uh you can do it a couple different ways, is abw-innovations.com or shop-century.com.

SPEAKER_00 34:42

Okay. We'll put those in the um we'll put those in the show notes at all. Dan, um, thank you. Look, uh, I and I'm gonna be honest with you. I thought you're always so tanned and fit looking. I thought you were a Hawaiian native. No, it shocks me to learn that you grew up in the Midwest in Chicago. Um and that may all change. Well, maybe you're moving down to Florida, did you say? Hopefully.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

Yeah, we're moving our operation. Island cream was bought out from us. We've been waiting on that for a little bit of time here, and that's concluded. So we're in the process now. We hope by the end of the year we have our operation moving in the Orlando area. Nice. Well done.

SPEAKER_00 35:19

Well, mate, uh, we'll put all these uh uh links in the show notes. Thank you so much for all you do. Thank you for being the ice cream person that's helping many, many ice cream shop owners uh save products, save money, save compressors, and uh we look forward to seeing you at ConeCon. Thank you, Steve. I appreciate the time.