Alexandria native Jason Hugenroth says he loved to “take stuff apart” as a kid. His father, Buddy, who ran an air-conditioning and refrigeration service, might bring a gadget home, and he’d take it apart, always trying to understand how things worked.
Well, he’s 53 now, married with three children and living in Baton Rouge, and he thinks his youthful curiosity brought him to a career in mechanical engineering, which brought him to being an inventor with a little more than 60 patents. That brought him to being featured recently in the Baton Rouge Business Report for a potential breakthrough invention that could significantly impact the soft serve ice cream business.
I’m all for that. Who doesn’t like ice cream, and, along the same lines, who doesn’t hate it when the worker at the local ice cream stand tells you at the drive-thru they are out of ice cream? The truth of the matter sometimes is, the dispensing machine needs cleaning and that’s a job for the person soon to arrive for the next shift.
That’s one of those problems that could be fun to solve, and our guy is on it. And, rather than being part of the brain drain migration to other states, Jason is doing so in the Bayou State where we all scream about ice cream.
Several years after graduating from LSU, Jason and his wife, the former Tracy Hannon of Metairie, moved to Indiana, where he pursued a doctorate, and after receiving that post-graduate degree in 2006, he and his budding family returned to Louisiana to be closer to home.
He is now the founder, president and CEO of Cremmjoy, a Baton Rouge-based soft serve technology startup. This is an outgrowth of Inventherm, a firm he founded in 2007 that boasts “state-of-the-art facilities” that help in their work with clients, ranging from individuals to multinational corporations, to develop innovative products.
Jason and three other men are the employees of this firm that works at LSU Innovation Park, a business incubator with six main buildings a few miles from the LSU campus.
In 2019, Jason says, he saw a YouTube feed about the cleaning process of soft serve ice cream machines and what a hassle it was, and that it had largely remained the same for close to 100 years.
“I identified it as the No. 1 pain point, or problem, in the industry,” he said, noting the daily requirements, for food safety purposes, of assembly and disassembly and sanitization. “I identified a market need and put together a couple of engineers at Inventherm, and said, ‘Let’s look at this and see what we can come up with, and see if it’s worth pursuing.’”
Jason and his crew set out to make machines that eliminate the need to disassemble, clean and sanitize by dispensing soft serve ice cream from exclusive packaging, so that from the liquid mix through dispensing, the soft serve mix never touches any part of the machine.
This kind of research takes funding for equipment and staffing, and it has been challenging to get the necessary funding over the years, especially in 2020 when the Covid pandemic shut down so much.
Covid, he says, was a low point, “when we really struggled to keep the lights on.”
Nonetheless, Cremmjoy, in increments, got the necessary funding — $100K here, $650K there and then in January of ’22, it raised $1 million from 23 private and corporate investors spanning seven states.
That funding, Jason says, was essential to delivering a machine design that could transform the soft serve ice cream industry. The Cremmjoy machine, he says, will eliminate all the downtime involved with disconnecting the machines and marking them as out-of-service while workers disassemble, clean and sanitize. This will cut annual operating costs, he says, by several thousand dollars per machine.
Feedback from soft serve places around Baton Rouge has been good, says Jason, satisfied that they see this breakthrough as a “big deal.” There’s more work to do, but he’s hoping to launch the new product on the market by late 2025 or early ’26.