Here’s a fun game: Guess how much this normal, everyday item costs at Erewhon, the exclusive Los Angeles-area specialty grocery. One gallon of raw milk? $20. A single Hailey Bieber smoothie? $19. Eight ounces of freeze-dried sweet potato slices? $27.99. That a single bag of ice — albeit specialty ice, formed into eight perfect spheres — costs $31.99 shouldn’t be terribly surprising. And yet! A TikTok video of the ice has recently gone viral, with over 3.6 million views as of this writing, and with many commenters expressing shock and awe.
The ice “ballz” are the work of Penny Pound Ice, which produces and distributes ice in Southern California. Penny Pound’s products range from familiar, like pebble ice ($7 for seven pounds), to fancy, including gold flake rocks ($28 for eight rocks) and round balls filled with edible orchids ($40 for eight balls). Though the company has been around since 2012 (its product is used at cocktail bars like Los Angeles’s Thunderbolt), it only got onto shelves at Erewhon last month, hence the surge of new attention — and confusion.
According to Gordon Bellaver, who’s been a partner at Penny Pound since 2014, “That’s been the biggest hurdle: trying to explain and I guess, in a way, to justify the difference in product and the difference in price as well.” In an interview with Eater, Bellaver answered the one question everyone is asking: Why does this ice cost $32?
Eater: Can you tell me about your mission as a company? Why ice?
Gordon Bellaver: The company was founded by Eric Alperin and Cedd Moses in an effort to bring better product to bars and restaurants, modeled on ice companies in New York City, which were modeled on ice companies in Japan, in which ice is considered a key and crucial ingredient and not an afterthought. The focus of Penny Pound is essentially to get everyone to drink better by using a more durable, longer lasting, and colder product in their beverages.
One of my boilerplate analogies is comparing it to a luxury automobile: If you’re spending $50, $60, $100 on a bottle of whiskey, or mezcal, or rum, but you’re putting in basic generic ice, it would be the equivalent, in my mind, of getting a Lamborghini and putting regular unleaded in it — it’s not doing service to the product that you’ve spent so much money on.
It takes anywhere from three to five days to freeze 300-pound blocks, and then we cut them down by hand and distribute them all over Southern California. It’s a very time consuming, labor intensive, and also dangerous process that a lot of people either take for granted or don’t have much forethought or concern about.
What makes your ice, as you mentioned, “more durable, longer lasting, and colder” than the ice that’s in my freezer right now?
Density plays a large factor. The more durable and dense that your piece of ice is — which also relates to how large the ice cube itself is — will directly and proportionately affect how quickly it dilutes the cocktail or the beverage. It’s based on surface area. There’s also the question of clarity and impurities. The reason that ice in your ice tray is cloudy is because any impurities that naturally exist in tap water, like calcium and magnesium, are locked in place when frozen, and that turns into what is the appearance of cloudiness. There’s some flavor going in the ice in your freezer as well.
The way that our ice is produced is that there’s constant agitation of the water. By doing that, the impurities don’t have a chance to settle. Effectively, what these machines do is push all the impurities to the top, which is where all the cloudiness is. Then we cut that off, leaving a clear 300-pound block of ice, which we then use band saws to cut down into the desired shapes to achieve the final product.
I’m sure you’re familiar with those silicone molds that allow you to freeze ice into a spherical shape. Can you describe how your round ice is different from that round ice?
Once again, it’s the water you’re starting with. Two: It’s compression or the overall starting point. When we’re making our ice spheres, we’re starting from a larger product which is more durable. It’s like a whole cow versus a single steak: We’re starting from the beginning product and then we’re breaking down the cow to get to the final product. The molds are jumping to the final product immediately, which is achievable, but it doesn’t have the same structural integrity.
Got it. And so, the question that everyone’s asking on TikTok: Why does the round ice cost $32?
The first point that I’ve been making, because I’ve been getting this same video a lot is: I don’t control Erewhon’s prices. [Editor’s note: The bag of eight “ballz” is $28 through Penny Pound’s website.]
In terms of what goes into it: When we’re producing the cubes, which are also available in Erewhon, once they get through the band saws, then they’re pretty much done. With the spheres, we either produce them one of two ways: with a drill press or a mold, but not a mold in the sense of what you’re thinking of in your freezer. There are metal molds that compress the cube of ice into desired shapes. To achieve a two-and-a-half-inch perfect sphere, we usually have to start with about a three- or three-and-a-half-inch cube. The raw material going into the product is already more than what the cubes are.
Not only do we have to make the cubes to then either press or to drill press [into spheres], but then there’s the labor that’s going into it. Labor in Los Angeles is expensive. And when it’s taking this much time for one or two employees to produce spheres, it naturally drives up the price. From our standpoint, it’s more raw material and labor than in the other ice products.
Who would you say your target audience is?
Since COVID, it’s done a bit of a shift. Pre-COVID, 90 to 93 percent of our business was bars and restaurants. These days, it’s closer to 65 to 70 percent. During COVID, there was not only a huge push in direct-to-consumer [sales], but also retail stores, liquor stores, grocery stores. We started targeting them to try and get our product to people at home.
There are some people who find value in the product and some people who don’t, and as much as I can talk about science and dilution and time and labor, usually our biggest selling point is just how attractive it is. I’ve learned that if people don’t think it’s viable — if people would rather just use their ice machine or a mold they already have — there’s usually very little I can do to convince them otherwise.
How do you feel about all this Erewhon-related attention?
The more that people talk about it, even if it’s in a negative way, the more people know about it and might be willing to try it. I always want to demo it with people: Buy a bag and put it side-by-side with something you’re drinking, and let me know. If your standard freezer ice tastes better and doesn’t melt faster, then great. But I’ve yet to see that happen.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
