IT DOES what it says on the tin: dispensing cold beer straight out of the shopping bag. In a move that could change the face of the barbecue forever, a Florida company has announced that it is gearing up for production of the world's first can that cools itself.

After countless delays and false starts, beverage breakthrough company Tempra Technology claims it is now finally ready to begin production of a revolutionary product that could earn its inventor a multi-million dollar fortune.

"If self-chilling cans are the beer drinker's Holy Grail, then we've found it for them. It has taken two decades and a lot of work to get this far, but everything is finally ready to roll, and the first cans should be hitting the open market within two years," said Dr Cullen Sabin, Tempra Technology's chief scientist.

With a multi-million dollar investment secured and a licensing deal with global packaging company Crown Cork & Seal signed and sealed, the Bradenton-based enterprise is poised to secure a slice of a rapidly expanding market. Should demand reach expectations, around a billion of the revolutionary containers could be in circulation by 2010.

About the size of an ordinary 500ml beverage can, the invention uses thermal, insulating and heat pump technology to cool its contents in three minutes flat. Activated by twisting an integral self-cooling device on the container's base, a natural desiccant inside draws the drink's heat through an evaporator and into an insulated heat-sink container, reducing the temperature by a minimum of 30F (16.7C).

Tempra Technology estimates that the added cost to a drink sold in one of its containers will be between 50 cents and $1 (25p-50p), depending on the premium the beverage manufacturer places on the package.

Billed as an entirely environmentally friendly solution to the age-old problem of warm beer, the Instant Cool Can (IC Can) contains only natural products. Completely non-toxic, it has even been designed not to explode if thrown on to a fire at a beach party.

"I have personally eaten every component and suffered no ill affects," said Sabin.

It is being hailed as a major development in beverage technology, but the potentially massive global business actually began life as a scam. Sabin, who formerly worked as a specialist in the ballistics of hypervelocity guns for Nasa, was building up a sideline in vetting the viability of new technologies when a friend asked him to run the scientific rule over a self-chilling beverage can he'd been offered.

"I did a quick back of the envelope calculation and told him it was impossible. It couldn't possibly work, but we loaded a bunch of instruments into the car and drove up just to see what kind of scam this guy was pulling," said Sabin.

"When we demonstrated that this was a dud, the inventor's wife jumped up and screamed, You wasted my daddy's money!' To which he replied, Gee, you're not going to yell at me all the way home are you?' It was the funniest thing that I've ever seen, but I knew that somewhere in there was the grain of a good idea."

Sabin and his colleagues took the concept, ran with it, and within six months had developed a working prototype. Although the design was completed in 1987, that turned out to be the easy part of turning their vision into a reality.

"This was a relatively straightforward exercise, but I hadn't calculated for the peculiar values of the investment world. If you drive out into the Mojave desert, leave your car, walk into the mountains until you collapse, crawl a bit further and then with your last, gasping breath whisper the word 'money', sleaze bags will appear out of thin air," said Sabin.

"The commercial potential of this product attracted an enormous amount of would-be investors, and a lot of them were con-artists. Weeding them out was the biggest challenge we faced."

Tempra Technology claims that it has the funds in place to build a full-scale manufacturing plant. Blueprints for the factory are currently being drawn up and the facility is scheduled to start production in 2009, ready to grab a slice of a global aluminum drinks can industry that currently produces an estimated 100 billion containers a year.

The company is also developing a range of heat-related products. An experimental self-heating ration pack is currently being field tested by the American military and several leading US stables are trialling prototype warm compresses designed to heal injured limbs on thoroughbred race horses.

"Once you've mastered controlling temperature from a standing-start, the number of potential applications is vast," said Sabin.

"Our first production product was actually a self-heating cosmetics pack for women. I don't know why anybody would want hot cold cream, but there are some things that even science should not try to fathom."