How a Lifetime of Feeding Crowds Built a Refrigerated Trailer Company
THE PROBLEM I COULDN'T SOLVE
One thing was always the bottleneck. Not staff, not menus, not the cooking. Cold storage.
I had a leased kitchen and never enough cold storage in it, and the lease meant I couldn’t build more. I had a warehouse full of walk-ins, reach-ins, cambros, ice chests, bagged ice and dry ice — and we still worked too hard at every single event just to keep food cold and safe. There had to be a better way. Nobody was selling it.
THE RULE NOBODY HAD USED
So I started reading. And what I found changed the next ten years of my life: Los Angeles County will let you keep cold storage on wheels. Sitting on the ground, no. On wheels, and moved, yes.
That rule had been on the books the whole time. As far as I can tell, nobody in food service had bothered to use it, because nobody was building the trailer you’d need to.
SO I DESIGNED IT MYSELF
I taught myself SketchUp and drew it. Then I flew to China, sat down with factories, and showed them exactly what I wanted. I had the first two built — a 12-footer for my own kitchen, and a smaller prototype of a food-trailer idea I’d been carrying around.
"DO YOU EVER RENT THAT OUT?"
HOW IT BECAME A COMPANY
Karen Tucker and I had already spent years running businesses together. So when this turned into a real company, we split it the way it should be split — I create and design, Karen runs operations and the dealer side. That’s her expertise, not mine. She’s co-founder and COO.
Our first market was Dallas. Alana had worked for me in the event business back in Los Angeles; when she moved home to Texas, Karen and I set her and Rick up as our first dealer.
We launched with a handful of trailers. Most of them in Dallas and Fort Worth, a couple in Los Angeles. That was the whole company.
COLD° HARD CASH — WE LAUNCHED INTO A PANDEMIC
I formally launched Keep It Cold° in 2020 and walked straight into a lockdown. My event and camp businesses went from 300 employees to eight in a matter of months. Earning cold cash turned into earning cold hard cash.
So we went to work. We opened a BBQ pop-up called BernieQue’s and ran the trailers through a 105° summer — dusty lot, thousands of customers, staff in and out of the cold all day long. If they could take that, they could take anything.
We didn’t just get through it. We came out of it knowing exactly what these trailers could do — and knowing we needed a lot more of them.
Need cold storage for an event?
THEN WE MOVED MANUFACTURING TO TEXAS
Coming out of a year like that one, I didn’t have the money to put up a factory. What I had was thirty years of people who’d worked with me.
Alana’s father is Al Dodds. He owns and operates Al Dodds Aviation, a jet service and maintenance business in Corpus Christi, Texas, and he’s something of a legend down there. Al had a small warehouse he wasn’t using much. He rented it to a company that barely existed.
On May 2nd, 2022, Al and I stood on scaffolding in that empty building and started working out how to turn it into a manufacturing line.
We still build in that same warehouse today.
WHAT WE BUILD NOW
That’s the KIC 2500, and there’s a 1500 and a 3500 now too, so the refrigeration matches the trailer instead of just being close. Ours are inverter-driven, which almost nothing in this class is. Sensor monitoring is next.
Today the trailers are designed by us, built from imported parts in Corpus Christi, titled and registered in Texas, and sent out to our dealers.
They are purpose-built road units. Not an indoor walk-in cooler bolted onto a trailer frame, which is what much of the competition is actually quoting you. And they run on 110-volt power — no diesel, no 220-volt hookup to arrange. It does have to be the right 110: a dedicated, non-GFCI, 20-amp circuit, not whatever outlet happens to be closest. Tell us what your site has and we’ll tell you straight whether it will run.
WHERE WE ARE NOW
The best part of this job is what people use them for. A few we never saw coming:
The production and prep of 600,000 corn dogs at a month-long fair.
We also still run the largest annual private event in Southern California, and that is where most of what we know about cold storage at scale came from. If you want the long version, we wrote it down — our Festival Vendor Cold Storage Guide.
OUR FOUNDING TEAM
Larry Klein
Founder & CEO. Designs the trailers, runs the company, and can’t walk past a cooler — ours or anybody else’s — without thinking about how to make it better.
Karen Tucker
Co-Founder & COO. Runs operations and the dealer network, and is the reason there is one.
Alana & Rick
Dallas–Fort Worth. Our first dealer, and still covering more of north Texas than anybody should be able to.
“They never give a customer the cold shoulder.”
AND THE PARTNERS WHO BUILT THE REST OF IT
Everything past Dallas belongs to the dealers who took Keep It Cold° into their own markets and run it as their own business — because that’s exactly what it is. They do the deliveries. They answer the phone at six in the morning. They’re the reason a customer in Nashville or Denver or San Antonio gets the same job a customer in Dallas gets.
We call them partners, and we owe them more than that word covers. You’ll find them on the city page for your market.
HOW WE DO BUSINESS
That’s how I’ve run every business I’ve had. It’s the reason the same people keep working with me, and it’s the reason Al rented a warehouse to a company that didn’t exist yet.
We keep your stuff cold. That’s the whole job. And after a career of doing it the hard way, I make sure we do it right.
Interested in bringing Keep It Cold° to your market?
We’re adding dealers across the country.
