Gold Coast based SuperCool Group is celebrating a milestone anniversary, marking 40 years in business.
The company’s managing director Mark Mitchell has reflected on four decades of service to the HVACR industry, noting that his early workshop ambitions started with trying to follow in his father’s footsteps.
"As one of the first Nissan dealers in Australia, my dad sold the first Bluebird in 1959, and became a Toyota dealer in 1963 with a visit from Mr Toyota himself," Mitchell said.
In 1982, SuperCool Car Airconditioning first hung out its shingle in Southport, Queensland with a small workshop. It didn’t take long for SuperCool to outgrow the premises.
Mitchell said a strong focus on fitting Unicla car air conditioning systems helped the fledgling workshop become one of the biggest dealers in the country, with a team of technicians burning the midnight oil to get through the workload.
The late ’80s saw a new workshop with an innovative new reticulated evacuation and charging system for each work bay, something that was previously unseen in Australia.
This allowed SuperCool to become the first auto workshop in the country to recover and recycle R12.
“The growing awareness of CFCs and ozone layer depletion across the world helped cement the business’s future position as an environmentally responsible HVACR company, something that continues to this day,” Mitchell said.
However, after becoming the national distributor of Unicla in 1997, SuperCool had a change of direction, selling its auto workshops and doubling down on the distribution of Unicla and refrigeration technologies across Australia and New Zealand.
Increased involvement with the refrigerated transport industry paved the way for the SuperCool Food Wastage Initiative, the development of the SuperSense SMARTprobe product simulation probe, and the formation of the training arm of the business, SuperSchool.
This complemented SuperTest and allowed Mitchell and his team to explore the potential for blending testing, research, engineering, product development and training.
“The Unicla eDrive is our latest achievement, and we're releasing the eDrive to market as we speak, under restrictions from the electronics supply chain crisis which we hope will ease in 2023,” Mitchell said.
“This year we have also completed SuperTest Thermal Chamber No 6, providing a new capability to test refrigerated display cabinets for energy efficiency to ISO standards.
"Refrigeration and air conditioning is a diverse field, and we have answered this call by developing different products and services to meet demands from various types of customers,” he said.
“More than once throughout this time we have achieved a few firsts in our industry that we’re very proud of, however current global supply chain and economic pressures are making things challenging for the industry.
“While global supply chain and economic pressures are impacting some of our capabilities, SuperCool is always here to assist the market as we focus on improving and capitalising on our current offering."