SYDNEY, N.S. — A growing Cape Breton company has a new name that promotes more of the work they do and the island’s communications technology history.
Mabel Systems is the new handle for award-winning Tracker Inventory Systems that helps food processors to better understand their inventory.
A new logo and website are part of the rebranding.
“The new name kind of gives us a little bit more room to grow our product lines,” said company CEO Gavin Andrews.
“A lot of what we are doing isn’t just specifically around inventory. There’s a lot of other factors we are measuring and managing for our customers. The first name was a little too restrictive for where we wanted to be.”
The company name pays tribute to Mabel Bell and the innovative work she and her husband Alexander Graham Bell undertook in Baddeck.
“This is our backyard and they were doing all this incredible work. It was a cool time. It was the industrial revolution and there was all this innovation in the world happening.”
Andrews believes another phase of technological innovation is underway that is seeing technology creep into every “crevice,” especially in industries like seafood and agriculture where they work.
“Those industries, they haven’t really been exposed to as much technology as some consumer-facing products,” he said.
“I also believe we can do this all on Cape Breton as well. There’s no reason why you need to be anywhere else do this stuff. We have everything we need right here.”
Andrews said the new website has been designed with operators in mind and its name has a more supporting sound to it than the old one.
Among the new products they hope will flourish with its launch is a new camera-based inventory system.
“We definitely want Mabel right on the camera,” he said.
“Everything we’ve done to date, we have kind of used a lot of different technologies but as we go into the camera system, we really want that Mabel name attached to that camera so that everybody knows that is a Mabel camera.”
Andrews created the first forms of the inventory tracking system with Matt Pyne for the commercial laundry industry.
The idea won seed money from the Nova Scotia Intersect Challenge in 2019, while its most recent version that provides aquaculture and seafood-processing facilities with automated inventory systems won $25,000 from the Ocean Supercluster Startup Challenge.
The company was also recently named an Innovocorp Sprint Challenge contest winner, which came with a $25,000 prize.
Greg McNeil is a business reporter at the Cape Breton Post.
