Jonathan Koifman’s shift from scuba instructor to clean-tech veteran was sparked by one insight: the industry moves far too slowly. Tired of the decade-long delays and bureaucratic hurdles facing mega-projects, he and co-founder Quinn Temmel launched FrostForge to make cooling as "plug-and-play" as solar.

Using revived adsorption technology, FrostForge converts abundant heat into grid-free refrigeration and ice. Their modular systems aim to repair a broken cold chain responsible for massive food and vaccine waste. In this interview, Jonathan discusses bypassing failing grids to deliver sustainable cooling exactly where it is needed most.

Long story short, I'm an ex-scuba instructor with 15 years of experience in renewable energy bizdev, specifically renewable heat. The one thing I kept seeing in the large- and mega-scale clean-tech world was the complexity of getting anything done. The permits, the engineering, the integration, the legions of decision-makers you had to convince to get anything to ground... Taking 5-10 years from inception to deployment is just inefficient. Why not make standard, modular systems that can be plug-and-play, like photovoltaic (PV) used to be?

So my co-founder Quinn and I looked at what could be done with the abundant renewable heat available around the world. It turns out that heat can drive cold, with nearly-forgotten adsorption technology. With this in mind, we spent 18 months researching the market and designing a modular, standalone product that can be installed anywhere, producing ice and cooling where it's needed.

Today, cooling already eats 10% of global electricity, refrigeration and air conditioning combined, while demand is set to triple by 2050. That means 2.8 billion people gaining first-time cooling access, but grid infrastructure development is lagging, and cannot scale fast enough to meet this surge. About 30% of food is lost, up to 50% of vaccines are wasted, and nearly 10% of GHG emissions come from food waste. Our solution drops grid-free cold and refrigeration right where people need it, all along the cold chain.

Food banks and aggregators, 3PL cold chain operators, and vaccine deployment groups all benefit from storage, measurable, sellable ice. All made without electricity, using solar heat.

Heat is everywhere! The sun, industrial systems, waste heat from power generation...all of this so-called “low-grade"“heat (90-120°C) can be used to drive our patent-pending adsorption process, outputting -10°C and up to 160kg of ice per day per unit. To qualify that, 160kg of ice means about 300 kg of fish stored, or 46,000 vaccine ampules, or 50,000 ChatGPT calls.

Our initial customers, in our MVP stage, are those that already pay daily for ice use: food banks, 3PLs (3rd party logistics), and cooperatives. Respectively, their pain points include things like food losses at storage and deployment from lack of power/cold, and enabling last-mile cold in emerging markets limiting service expansion, as well as reducing post-harvest losses before produce reaching the market.

The innovation is pretty clear: ice and cold without the need for an electric grid. The standard (grid + big chillers) is unsustainable, and we can provide scalable, modular, and local solutions when and where they're needed!

The moat lies in our mix of salt and ammonia (the "adsorber pair”), as well as the patent-pending internal heat exchanger design - it's how we get the solar heat into the system and drive the reaction more efficiently. There's some more manufacturing know-how there (e.g. how we get everything inside), the controls and so on, but overall the technology is a first-mover in a technically difficult field: thermo-chemical refrigeration.

We have another few patents in the pipeline, but we're pushing to get the first demo units built and installed before moving on that - they're more refinements than requirements. This is an intrinsically scalable system, on a technical level: more heat exchangers means more cold per kg of ice we can deliver. It's a matter of finding the heat, but we've already established it's readily available.

In terms of commercial scale, this icemaking system is part of a platform: Heat in = cold out. Aside from our MVP of an icemaker, this tech, once proven, can be deployed as local cold rooms, air conditioning, and many more markets. Cold is simply everywhere, just take a look!

I think we're going to change the world. For real, and in short order.

The IFC has published that the sustainable cooling market will hit $600B by 2050. This means that billions of people worldwide need cold, but don't have the infrastructure to receive it. That's not just sad, it's a failure of us as humans.

FrostForge is building products to serve this need, right now. We start with ice, which is used to help feed and medicate the world. Then we move to air conditioning, which will help us survive even further while research to clean up our planet is moving forward in parallel.

To start, we are B2B, selling one-off hardware for ice and cold to the ICPs we've mentioned: 3PL, cooperatives, medical distributors, and NGOs. With that established, there is a B2B2B model in the works, not just supplying the hardware, but also the services and training to expand our product reach globally, locally.

So far, we don't have any customers. We're still pre-product, pre-revenue. That said, we've already been in touch with 3PLs, NGOs, and even a caterer here in Geneva that all respond positively. They see how we can solve their last mile vaccine delivery issue in Nigeria, increase profits on fresh fish in Kenya, and cut costs at events in Geneva. It’s needed everywhere.

According to the IFC, the market is around $200B right now, growing 3x by 2050. In terms of serviceable addressable market, we should hit 3.5% of that, given where sunlight is good — about 1/3 of world — and where power is weak, which is about 10% of world. That's already a $21B market, ready to go.

Growth drivers are the real tailwinds right now: fragile grids (look at the Spain blackout in 2025), fuel prices varying wildly, huge surge in demand ahead, and even regulatory pressures (Kigali Amendment) to remove HFC refrigerants like freon.

We're different to existing solutions like PV + freezer because we work better the hotter it gets outside. PV, batteries, etc, all have an issue that extreme temperatures have significant negative effect. We're already using heat, and the more we get the better the reaction works - it's faster. Moreover, the PV systems are not designed for sub-zero cold, which means they exclude a huge portion of the market, and cannot deliver just ice. This gives us an edge, with more potential users and wider markets.

This is the million-dollar question! 2026 is the year of our pilots - we are actively speaking with offtakers to deploy initial MVPs. With the market data from this, and an equity round, we will build out the design and engineering team to deliver a manufacturable, standardized system with commercial sales in 2027. Keeping it small and tight, we have room to grow.

Once we've established the FrostForge solution in 2-3 key markets, with robust and continuous operations, we will further expand the team and product line into electricity-free air conditioning... that's where the revolution will start!

We're a hardware company, so cash is king! At the same time, we're pre-product, so an equity round still needs some real foundational work, in terms of patents, paying customers, and so on.

We are currently raising a CHF 500K convertible note to get us to "investible." We've already raised CHF 180K from friends and family - this whole round is to fund the pilot development and deployment, so we can raise the equity round for real market entry.
We're getting there!

First and foremost: start asking yourself where and how you use cold. It's magical when I talk about this market to the disbelievers, until they realize that every meal, every med, every click of a button is related to cooling.

I'm looking for partners to co-finance pilot deployments and market development. That's the biggest leg-up we can get!

Investment is good, but I want to see this tech come to market and make a difference. The only way to do that is to invest in the actual systems and deployments, building and showing the markets that it's not just viable, but necessary — now.

Email me anytime, or find me on LinkedIn. And give us a follow on LinkedIn, I promise to post a lot more this year!