Patience and Hope

It takes a long time, apparently, to become the Velcro of the beverage can, coffee cup and soup container industry.
But waiting is nonetheless the spot Barney Guarino finds himself in these days.
Guarino's firm, Bradenton-based Tempra Technology, has been lauded locally and nationwide for its patented and proprietary self-heating and self-cooling technologies. The company is a past runner-up for the Review's Technology Innovation Award, and Guarino is a past finalist for the Review's Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
One of its core products is the Instant Cool Can, which lowers beverage temperature by at least 30 degrees in about three minutes through the use of water evaporation. Guarino claims it's the world's first and only “commercially viable self-refrigerating can.”
Another Tempra product, on the opposite side of the temperature spectrum, is a pouch-package that automatically self-heats to warm the contents when it's squeezed.
But the 17-year-old company, despite several close calls over the last five to 10 years, has yet to fulfill the lofty goals it has set in terms of licensing sales. Tempra, which has raised $27 million in investment capital since it was founded, has also passed on at least half a dozen opportunities to sell its patents or go public in a reverse merger.
“If you take a look at the calendar, it does seem like a long time,” says Guarino, who bought Tempra in the early 1990s after meeting the original founders while an investment banker for Morgan Stanley. “But for me it doesn't seem that long because of the excitement and enthusiasm for the company.”
That, and Guarino is a stubborn New York transplant who considers the company's mission — to bring in tens of millions of dollars in annual revenues through licensing and royalties — the ultimate entrepreneurial challenge of his business life. Even more of a challenge than the late 1980s, when, with Morgan Stanley, Guarino worked on the complicated financing project for what is now the St. Petersburg Times Forum in Tampa.