22/12/2017
Company History
The foundations of IMA were formed back in 1975 and for the first 15 years was a successful refrigeration contracting company with a succession of water chilling ammonia plants with associated chill stores in the Dairy industry, complete cooked meat processing plants, abattoirs and meat blast freezers.
The company also held contracts with London Hotels such as Forte Even Heathrow, Ariel Hotel Heathrow, Edwardian Hotel Heathrow, The Ritz, The Savoy and The Waldorf. The company had good relationships with in London Helping them to acquire such chains as the London steak house Group, Fisherman Wharf Group and J Lyons Tea shops.
In these early days, the company built its own cold rooms and freezers and was one of the first to use composite panels which are common place today.
Birth Of IMA Cooling Systems
Prior to the formation of IMA Cooling Systems in 1989, the company had begun to diversify and found itself heavily involved in fresh produce refrigeration during which time our range of High Humidity Coolers (HHC) were developed with sizes ranging from 12kW to 130kW. The early success of the High Humidity Cooler was in the mushroom growing industry whereby virtually every mushroom farm in England and Ireland had High Humidity Cold Stores. This success in mushroom cooling also extended to South Africa, Malta, India and Australia.
IMA International
Our first two overseas contracts were in 1990. A large Pack House complex in The Gambia with two 100kW Pre-Coolers and a smaller scale Pack House with a 50kW Pre Cooler in Portugal; This facility was a strawberry farm where the High Humidity Cooler was used for storing Strawberry plants at 2°C and 97 RH for export, mainly to the UK. The cooler was of course used for cooling the strawberries as well.
Following the success in The Gambia, Kenya took off in a big way with IMA installing complete Pack Houses for all the main exporters. Such was this boom that we opened an office in Nairobi with a workforce to maintain and service the numerous refrigeration plants. To satisfy the large chain supermarkets the Pack Houses had to be built to British Retail Consortium (BRC) standards which were audited by them before they would accept any produce.
IMA’s expertise ensured the standards were maintained such that the UK importers specified IMA to their prospective suppliers.
IMA has worked all over the world Designing and Building Cold storage facilities to countries where fresh produce is grown, IMA has since shipped Complete Pack houses, loaded into multiple sea containers full of insulation panels, doors and refrigeration equipment to the following countries :
Kenya
Tanzania
Uganda
Ghana
Ivory Coast
Zimbabwe
Zambia
Malta
Spain
Italy
Portugal
Ireland
Scotland
Barbados
Gambia
Jordan
South Africa
Thailand
Australia
Senegal
Guatemala
Egypt
Germany
Morocco
France
Jamaica
India
IMA now have contracts with all major import and exporters of fresh produce that supply the UK supermarket chains such as Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury,ASDA and Aldi.