Garrett Voss

In the field since 2011 · Longmont, Colorado

From the dish pit to the door seals

Garrett Voss spent his first years out of high school washing dishes and later running the line at a Longmont diner, which is where he first learned that a walk-in with a bad door seal can quietly eat a restaurant’s margin. He moved to the service side of the industry in 2011, starting as a helper on a commercial kitchen equipment crew and working his way into refrigeration maintenance across the Front Range.

Since then he has replaced door gaskets on just about every kind of unit a commercial kitchen can hold: walk-in coolers and freezers, reach-ins, glass display cases, prep tables, and under-counter refrigerated drawers. By his own rough count, he has swapped out more than 4,000 seals for restaurants, breweries, school kitchens, grocery stores, and cafeterias between Boulder and Lyons.

“Most of the problems I get called out for could have been caught months earlier.”

Why the blog exists, in one sentence

Garrett writes The Gasketeers blog because most of the problems he gets called out for could have been caught months earlier. His articles cover the practical side of refrigeration upkeep: how to spot a failing gasket before it fails, what a leaking door actually costs in energy, how health inspectors look at door seals, and when a repair makes more sense than a full replacement.

He lives in Longmont with his wife and two kids. When he is not elbow-deep in a walk-in, he is usually fly fishing the St. Vrain or coaching his son’s baseball team.

What he writes about