At the Owings Mills lot formerly home to one of the largest ice cream manufacturers in Maryland, trucks shipping tons of frozen cakes used to jam wide roads while towering tanks of liquid nitrogen hissed at the oncoming traffic.

Now it’s quiet. Some neighboring businesses called the factory deserted. But most days Totally Cool Inc. founder Michael Uhlfelder and one of two other remaining employees can be seen parking their cars in front of the recently shuttered trucking docks, where they sit in the office of a 42,000-square-foot vacant factory, phoning lawyers and retailers in an attempt to sell the company.

Since an eight-day U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspection in May discovered the bacteria causing listeria around one of Totally Cool’s manufacturing lines, the company was ordered to cease production and recall more than 60 ice cream products, which were sold across 13 brands nationwide. Once the recall was announced on June 21, Totally Cool laid off 68 of its 71 employees and later filed for bankruptcy — shocking business owners that went from seeing the manufacturer as a fast-rising star to a cautionary tale.

“I’ll always remember that phone call, when [Uhlfelder] told me, ‘We’re not going to survive this,’” Taharka Brothers owner Sean Smeeton said of the fallout from the inspection. Listeria is “the big scary L-word in our business. … I would just never expect this to happen to Mike of all people.

“It all came crashing down after one test.”

Totally Cool began in 1992 as an underdog. Thanks to a $40,000 loan, what started as Uhlfelder’s attempt at a Carroll County ice cream shop pivoted into a company specializing in ice cream cakes for hotels and catering companies, according to a 1998 Baltimore Business Journal article.

That interview, which referred to the business’s growth at the time as a “comeback” for the entrepreneur, is among the few Uhlfelder has ever done. That’s largely because he never wanted to market himself, said Smeeton, who has known Uhlfelder since 2013 and whose beloved Baltimore ice cream brand suffered about $45,000 in losses from the factory’s shutdown.

“I used to tell him you have to change the name,” Smeeton said; forcing people to say it was a “Totally Cool” company would not play well. But Uhlfelder didn’t care. He fell in love with ice cream while working at a Carvel shop in high school, and decades later still felt a boyish crush for the dessert.

Uhlfelder had to be successful: He cleaned the building, carried fridges to the roof and built machines with liquid nitrogen able to pump out thousands of iced cakes, sandwiches and pints. With new tunnel freezers purchased in 2023, he was able to grow even larger, producing 800,000 to 1.5 million ice cream cakes, pints and cups each month, according to an interview with ProFood World.

He showed Smeeton the ropes of ice cream manufacturing and allowed him to use Totally Cool’s equipment to start up the Taharka Brothers business free of charge. In their last month of operations, Totally Cool did their first official collaboration with the brand on a few thousand pints of ice cream. They planned on doing another in the fall.

Smeeton is one of a number of business owners frightened by Totally Cool’s sudden closure, some of whom have reached out in the last week to Russ Taylor, head of business development at Secure CPG, which works with food retailers and manufacturers nationally on recall insurance.

“[Totally Cool] is a bit of an anomaly,” Taylor said.

The company’s output was massive: more than five production lines able to churn tens of thousands of pints in a few hours and shipping nationwide to sellers who could stockpile the desserts for up to six months. He can’t remember the last time he saw such a far-reaching recall with one potentially contaminated production line.

Over its three-decade tenure, Totally Cool had only previously suffered minor slaps on the wrist from FDA inspections related to sanitation practices and prevention of contamination, according to federal data. This summer’s shutdown came as a deadly listeria outbreak splashed across national headlines with nine people dead and one Boar’s Head factory closed indefinitely. Unlike other bacteria causing food sickness, listeria can survive and multiply in cold, damp spaces. Symptoms for the bacterial infection can appear hours or months later.

No illnesses linked to Totally Cool have been reported.

The Banner reached out to a dozen former factory employees, Uhlfelder and his attorney; all declined to comment on the business. Two lawsuits have been filed so far against Totally Cool: one in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York alleging that notice of the recall was insufficient, and another alleging the manufacturer owes more than $400,000 for services provided by the United Dairy company, which sold an ice cream mix and more to the business.

The claims filed by businesses who had to incinerate their storage and cut ties with Totally Cool will be in the millions, Taylor said, adding that multiple clients he works with were impacted and one family-owned retailer is already going under due to the losses.

“This is a battle for survival,” he said of the smaller brands who outsourced their manufacturing to the Owings Mills company. “Recalls like this really open people’s eyes into evaluating who they’re working with and their supply chain as a whole.”

Taylor said recalls have been on the rise over the last three years. Businesses can pursue insurance policies to protect themselves, but due to Totally Cool’s growth in size and churn, he said, it was ultimately unlikely to recover.

An auction on Sept. 30 will allow companies to bid on the factory’s property, heavy machinery and other specialized equipment, per recent bankruptcy filings, as a means of helping pay back retailers that span from a small ice cream shop in Colorado to Friendly’s to Hershey’s Ice Cream.

Shaine Gahan, who has owned the Chesapeake Tile & Marble store across the street at Gwynn Mills Court since 1986, said he saw Uhlfelder’s factory nearly double in size over the last seven years. Uhlfelder bought all the leases to the lots neighboring his building, Gahan said, and built up each production section to 3,600 square feet. He separated them with block walls and would just knock one down to build another, Gahan said. “Sometimes he’d come across the street and he’d give out extra ice cream, you know, the stuff that didn’t fit in the canister.”

Even as they became one of the biggest businesses in Owings Mills, Gahan would check in on Uhlfelder, often calling him on Sundays to pester him about working through the weekend.

“I’d say, ‘What are you still doing working?’ and he’d say, ‘Same as you.’”

Gahan still calls the Totally Cool plant to check in, and occasionally notices when Uhlfelder’s car is parked in the lot. But now he’s grown used to listening to the phone ring.