Britain’s leading ice company makes five billion cubes a year, filling everything from cocktail glasses to ice baths. Now it faces its toughest challenge – for what is ice without a party season?
The ice in your drink comes from one of two places: your freezer, or someone else’s. For homemade ice, the supply chain is reassuringly familiar: water goes into the freezer, and a bit later, ice comes out. But what about the ice cubes that you bought from a supermarket, or extracted, by the handful, from a plastic bag at a drinks party? They were frozen when you took possession of them; they are long gone now. Where did they start out, back when they were water?
Follow their journey all the way back from the point of sale – through warehouses and depots and cold storage facilities and innumerable temperature-controlled lorries – and there’s a decent chance that most of them came from the same place: an industrial estate just outside South Kirkby in West Yorkshire. The company that made them is called The Ice Co, and if you haven’t heard of it, you have almost certainly used its products.
Continue reading…Britain’s leading ice company makes five billion cubes a year, filling everything from cocktail glasses to ice baths. Now it faces its toughest challenge – for what is ice without a party season?The ice in your drink comes from one of two places: your freezer, or someone else’s. For homemade ice, the supply chain is reassuringly familiar: water goes into the freezer, and a bit later, ice comes out. But what about the ice cubes that you bought from a supermarket, or extracted, by the handful, from a plastic bag at a drinks party? They were frozen when you took possession of them; they are long gone now. Where did they start out, back when they were water?Follow their journey all the way back from the point of sale – through warehouses and depots and cold storage facilities and innumerable temperature-controlled lorries – and there’s a decent chance that most of them came from the same place: an industrial estate just outside South Kirkby in West Yorkshire. The company that made them is called The Ice Co, and if you haven’t heard of it, you have almost certainly used its products. Continue reading…