Mülheim, Germany: Peter Großkopf, pictured above right, has retired and steps down from his advisory role with E-Cooltech.
Großkopf (77) has worked in the industry for over 40 years to develop innovative transport refrigeration. He founded Frigoblock in 1978 and built the business into a world-leading brand before selling it to Thermo King in 2015.
Under his leadership, Frigoblock developed into one of the largest European manufacturers of electrically driven transport fridges. More recently he advised a new company, E-Cooltech which he founded and was managing diector, helping Henning Altebäumer, chief executive, and Jürgen Süß, chief technical officer, develop the comany’s transport refrigeration system.
“E-Cooltech’s mission is clear: we will make temperature-controlled transport by road as environmentally friendly as possible and offer both economic and transport quality advantages to all fleet operators,” Altebäumer says.
Süß said: “In order to achieve this, we use technologies that the industry has ignored so far, but which are tried and tested and whose benefits for the environment and transport operators have been proven. These include natural refrigerants in refrigeration generation and distribution.”.
For many years, Großkopf was president of the Technical Advisory Board of Transfrigoroute Germany and Transfrigoroute International. He was also active for several years on the board of the German Frozen Food Institute and was a member of the International Institute of Refrigeration, the German Refrigeration Association and the Association of German Refrigerated Warehouses and Refrigerated Logistics Companies.
Großkopf dedicated his entire life to transport refrigeration and acquired practical knowledge as early as 1955 in his parents’ frozen foods wholesale business. There he became acquainted with the advantages and disadvantages of the various transport refrigeration systems. Since suitable transport equipment was not available in sufficient quantities and with the desired performance at the time, his parents’ company developed its own systems and bodies. Großkopf was already working on insulating panels and foaming techniques at that time.
He deepened this knowledge during his mechanical engineering studies at the University of Hanover, specialising in refrigeration technology and in the optimisation of lightweight sandwich panel constructions as well as transport refrigeration systems. He then continued this work at the Institute of Science of Materials at the Official Materials Testing Institute before eventually founding Frigoblock, leaving a positive and important lasting impression on transport refrigeration technology.
Pictured above are Dr Jürgen Süß (left) Henning Altebäumer centre and Peter Großkopf (right)
