Tuesday, September 29, 2009

MooBella puts second pilot machine at Northeastern

By Rodney H. Brown

Ice cream automation technology company MooBella Inc. says it will site its second pilot vending machine-like “ice creamery” in the Curry Student Center at Northeastern University Wednesday.

MooBella, which was first written about in Mass High Tech in 2006 and whose recent $18 million funding round was first reported in the Boston Business Journal on September 21,  already has a pilot machine installed at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The company displayed its technology with a pair of MooBella machines at the recent Emerging Technologies 2009 event put on by Technology Review at MIT, and was the hit of the show.

The Taunton-based company’s technology allows for the choice of custom-made ice cream of various flavors and additions such as M&M’s, and produces a hard-serve cup in under one minute. The test machine at WPI ran at the end of last semester for around 40 days. According to Dave Peters, vice president of sales and marketing, MooBella never had to service the machine once in that time frame, and it averaged 80 servings of ice cream per day.

Prior to the recent $18 million round, MooBella had raised a total of $20 million as it tried to perfect its technology and improve its reliability.