LATIMER — Burtek Dry Ice, owned by Fort Dodge native Mike Kentfield, continues to expand its operations and is serving the needs of one of the largest plants in the Fort Dodge region.

In 2017, Burtek Dry Ice landed a contract to provide dry ice to Prestage Foods of Iowa, according to Kentfield.

Prestage’s pork plant is located south of Eagle Grove.

To accommodate the needs of Prestage, a new manufacturing plant for Kentfield’s company was built in Latimer.

“This also gave us the ability to expand our customer base north and east,” Kentfield said.

Kentfield is a 1997 Fort Dodge Senior High graduate. He studied at the University of Iowa and graduated in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in business.

In 2015, Kentfield said he and a friend, Matt Onstot from Lake View, came across a company for sale that was a distributor of dry ice.

“After doing our due diligence, we bought the company and launched our plan to grow it,” he said. “During the summer of 2015, we realized if we wanted to grow this company, we needed to take it from a distributor of dry ice to a manufacturer and distributor of dry ice.”

That’s when Kentfield moved the business to West Des Moines and bought a 50-ton liquid CO2 tank and a dry ice pelletizer to begin manufacturing dry ice.

“Being the only independently owned dry ice manufacturer in Iowa gave us a lot of new prospects and we quickly out grew our production and had to purchase another pelletizer and expand our trucking fleet,” Kentfield said. “As we continued to service our existing customers and expand on new customers, we became know for our service and ability to be flexible with our deliveries.”

Kentfield said the company has plans to open another plant east of Iowa sometime in the future.