Igloo Cool Boxes

Igloo has been making coolers since 1947. The company started as a metalworking shop in Houston, Texas, where a group of investors developed an insulated steel water jug to supply cold drinking water to oil field workers. At the time, water was carried to job sites in wooden buckets, and the Houston heat made that a pretty miserable arrangement. Igloo's handmade steel coolers used a double-locked seam construction to keep water cold and stop leaks, and they caught on quickly across the Texas oil industry.

Through the 1950s, Igloo added plastic and styrene liners to its steel coolers and acquired two competing brands, Horton and Polar King. The company merged with Production Tooling Company in 1960 and briefly operated under the name Texas Tennessee Industries. In 1962 came one of Igloo's biggest contributions to the outdoor industry: the first all-plastic ice chest. That 48-quart model was originally marketed to breweries, but sportsmen and campers adopted it fast. Plastic was lighter, didn't rust, and insulated better than steel. It changed what a portable cooler could be.

The product that most people associate with Igloo arrived in 1971: the Playmate. Its tent-top lid with a one-handed push-button release made it compact, simple and tough. It held 18 cans, fitted on a car seat, and quickly became the default lunch cooler across America. The Playmate's design was considered significant enough to earn a place in the Smithsonian Institution's permanent collection. Igloo followed that in 1994 with the first wheeled cooler, adding mobility to larger ice chests that were too heavy to carry when fully loaded.

Igloo is now a subsidiary of Dometic Group, the Swedish manufacturer of caravan, motorhome and outdoor leisure products. Dometic acquired Igloo in 2021. The company still manufactures at its 1.8 million square foot facility in Katy, Texas, with over 1,200 employees producing around 16 million coolers a year. The product range covers hard-sided ice chests, wheeled coolers, soft-sided cooler bags, insulated backpacks, water jugs and drinkware.

For camping in the UK, Igloo's MaxCold range is the line to pay attention to. These are passive cool boxes with Ultratherm insulation in the body and the lid, tested to hold ice for up to 5 days at 32 degrees Celsius ambient temperature. They don't need power, gas or batteries, so there's nothing to plug in or recharge. You fill them with ice or ice packs and they do the work through insulation alone. That makes them a straightforward, reliable option for camping trips, festivals, beach days and barbecues. The trade-off is that ice retention depends on how often you open the lid and how warm it is outside, and you'll need access to fresh ice or a freezer to restock for trips longer than a few days.