The society sought nominations for this award through the press and other air conditioning and refrigeration medial channels. The award was to go to an individual who had shown exceptional skills, support or vision and therefore furthered the advancement and recognition of the RACHP industry.

The award was presented by Steve Gill, former president of the Institute of Refrigeration and founder of the World Refrigeration Day initiative. Mr Gill informed the audience of how the concept and idea was hatched, as well as how so many companies across the globe had signed up and supported the event.

The idea was designed to raise global awareness of the importance of the refrigeration and air conditioning industry in daily modern life across the world.

Mr Gill continued by informing the audience that the recipient of the award was a very professional, enthusiastic and dedicated individual who had served the RACHP industry for many years and deserved the recognition for their achievements. Mr Gill noted his great pleasure at being able to present the award to John Emm.

Mr Emm started his working life at 16 with a full five year refrigeration engineering apprenticeship with Carter and Finmore, who were a York and Kelvinator installer based in Southampton. After nine years Mr Emm was keen to expand his knowledge into large commercial and industrial refrigeration, so he joined J&E Hall.

After a short space of time he was promoted to senior engineer and became the youngest person in that role that J&E Hall had.

During his time there he looked after all the refrigeration and air conditioning, as well as special projects at Harwell. With his involvement in such projects he worked closely with the project teams, with the hope of going forward to sell the concepts to Harwell’s engineering department.

This gave him great satisfaction and developed his interest in pursuing a career change into sales. This is when he joined Dean and Wood as the Southern area sales engineer, once again being promoted to Southampton branch manager.

Once again, after nine successful years, he needed a fresh challenge and was recruited as general manager/ chief executive by Refrigeration House in Saudi Arabia. He was responsible for six RAC wholesale branches, a grilles and diffuser manufacturing operation and oversaw an operation and maintenance company which employed over 500 personnel.

Moving back to the UK Mr Emm joined Dawmec, the Copeland distributer for the UK as regional sales manager. It wasn’t long before he added export sales to his portfolio, this was then followed by becoming managing director. After 10 years and seeing a gap in the market, he set up Enetech Products which manufactured bespoke refrigeration packs for the retail sector.

Unfortunately his health began to decline, and in 2009 he suffered a major stroke, paralyzing the left-hand side of his body. With grit, determination and a brilliant rehabilitation team he fought his way back to reasonable normality.

Even after this he offered his services as a product consultant and carried out specific projects with companies such as Advanced Engineering, Kriwan in Germany , Rivacold in Italy and Siccom in France.

Siccom were very impressed with his vast knowledge of the RAC industry and offered him the distributorship of their complete product portfolio. This is how Pumps2go was formed.

After 55 years in the industry he is still working and shows no sign of retiring. In addition to his career he has also been very active in the IoR, where he was chairman of the membership committee and has also sat on the IoR Council.

He was chairman of the equipment and components section of the British Refrigeration Association which is part of FETA.

During the 1980’s he reformed the HRS and over the past 30 plus years he and his fellow committee members have seen continual growth and success in the society.