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48 49 and the final assembly and testing,” Marlowe says. “We do contract out some sub-as- sembling, depending on the equipment.” In 2016, the company acquired its main com- petitor, Icetech, a Danish company that had manufacturing sites in Denmark and Poland, which Cold Jet continued to keep in oper- ation. It sells its products both directly and through distribution, and maintains sales and service offices in China, Japan, Belgium (its European headquarters are in Brussels), Germany, Poland, and Denmark. “In the U.S., we mostly do direct sales,” he adds. “We have a few key distributors that are also dry ice suppliers, so they have an inside track to sales, but most of it is direct in the U.S., Can- ada, and even in Latin America, although we have a mix of distributors in South America. In Mexico, we do mostly direct sales.” Having already acquired its main compet- itor, Marlowe admits that there aren’t too COLD JET, LLC CONVEYOR BELT BEFORE CONVEYOR BELT AFTER many others in the dry ice blasting world to contend with. “It’s definitely a niche market,” he avers. “But the thing that separates us is we’re kind of the prime mover.We have been the innovator for the last 30 years and we continue to be so. Dry ice is minus-109° Fahrenheit, mi- nus-79° Celsius, so it can be a little difficult to work with. It wants to suck moisture out of the air and freeze it into water and it can clump up and cause problems. So, you have to have a fair amount of planning into your machine to keep it moving and keep it loose and keep it flowing. The other thing–dry ice is such a soft media, you have to get it moving very fast.When it hits something, it turns to gas so you have to take a three-millimeter pellet, or something smaller, put it in a hopper, then through an air lock and mix it with compressed air, speed it up from zero to even as high as 1,200 feet per second. You have to get those high velocities in order for it to be effective without any turbulence. And we know how to do that.We actually hired a guy from GE Aerospace to design feeders and nozzles for us just because of that. So there’s a fair amount of industry knowledge, there. “But to sum up why we’re better, I would have to say: performance, which means faster, more powerful cleaning.We do more with less; the variable costs – compressed air and dry ice - go down and the cleaning performance goes up.