Monday, May 8, 2006

Cold cash: Machine offers ice-cream on demand

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

To the untrained eye, ice cream may appear to be a low-tech concoction, but Brian Ginsberg, president and chief operating officer of MooBella LLC, begs to differ. His Taunton company has developed a machine that can create a 4.5-ounce scoop of ice cream, in nearly any flavor, in about 45 seconds.

Launched this past February, the machine, called the MooBella Ice Cream System, is a far cry from asking a teen-age soda jerk to dig out a couple of scoops of chocolate. The machine boasts six foreign patents and 12 U.S. patents, including a notoriously difficult-to-obtain "business process" patent. The machine itself contains a computer brain running a Linux operating system and a series of databases and control mechanisms that aerate, flavor, mix and flash-freeze the ingredients to create any of 96 flavors of ice cream at any given time.

It also has a wireless link to enable machines to communicate sales data, inventory and deliver machine updates, such as marketing messages, via the Internet.

"We have set out to marry technology with food," said Jim Baxter, MooBella's vice president of engineering.

The initial application is for cafeterias and manned food service areas that do not yet serve ice cream, according to Ginsberg, who previously helped grow Boston's International Ice Cream Corp. into a major distributor before merging it with New England Frozen Foods in 1997. MooBella maintains ownership of the machines and offers a loan program to food service operators, eliminating any initial capital outlay.

The company may consider stand-alone vending machines in the future, but for now, the machines are run by food-service retailers.

MooBella has started rolling out its system in New England -- it has already installed machines at Brandeis University and at Children's Hospital Boston -- and expects to have a few hundred machines in the area by the end of the year.

MooBella has been developing its technology since 2001, subsisting on funding from a few hundred friends, family and small institutional investors, said Ginsberg, who declined to release exact funding amounts. With the launch of the product, the company has begun a search for more significant funding to help take the system national and beyond, he said.