GoKawiilIce has gone crazy. Granted, that's not an unusual phrase to read right now, but here we're talking about how the drive for fancy frozen water is leading the human race to do some seemingly very silly things. Businesses are making serious money shipping huge blocks of ice from Japan to the US, harvesting lake ice in Norway using tractors, and even shipping giant pieces of Greenland's glaciers 9,000 nautical miles to Dubai.
All this is being done for the increasingly lucrative trade in high-end cocktail bars looking to differentiate their beverages with impassioned tales of the purity of their ice, heralding from springs and mountain streams in far-flung locations, or the “romance” of adding 100,000-year-old glacial ice to your 18-year-old single malt.
“What a fundamentally ridiculous thing.” Mike Berners-Lee (yes, brother of the creator of the World Wide Web) is amazed when I tell him of this frozen economy. While his sibling Tim has been the global figurehead for the web, Mike has been charting climate change since 2005. As the founder of Small World Consulting, his research includes charting carbon accounting methodologies and sustainable food systems. Mike Berners-Lee’s first book, How Bad Are Bananas?, tracked carbon emissions from all kinds of things, from a single email to a dishwasher and flights across the Atlantic.
“Stand back a minute and have a look at the world, the situation it’s in, and what the world needs at the moment,” Berners-Lee says. “We absolutely do not need people messing around with this kind of thing. It's the same as deciding to spend your surplus wealth on a tourist trip into space. It's a completely thoughtless way of spending resources."
“I get involved in people discussing how the world can have a more sustainable economy, how we can make sure we look after all people—these sorts of questions,” he continued. "And one of the key things is you have an economy in which fewer people are doing bullshit jobs. I'm afraid the luxury ice industry would be the first to go.”
Luxury ice, however, is big business. New York City-based Hundredweight Ice harvests more than 3 million pounds of ice a year and generated $3 million in revenue in 2025, selling to Michelin-starred restaurants and the like. Purveyors like Disco Cubes sell nine cubes for $75. Spheres, more wasteful to make, generally retail for higher prices. That Greenland glacial ice? Arctic Ice proudly calls its wares “the world's most expensive ice,” yours (until it melts) at $100 for six cubes.
The Iceman Cometh
Regardless of where you drink, frozen water at these prices is punchy. So just how different is this luxury ice from any that you can make at home? “Well, really it's not functionally different, but there's more romance to the story in the serve of the drink. That's really what you're getting,” says Camper English, a San Francisco–based drinks writer and educator, and author of The Ice Book.
Beyond romance, the main argument companies make for imported ice is purity. “Our pure iceberg ice has little to no taste, ensuring it doesn’t alter the flavor of beverages as it melts … ice that is very old has not been polluted in any way by modern industry,” claims Arctic Ice, for example. Kuramoto Ice, which manufactures luxury ice two and a half hours outside of Tokyo in Kanazawa, says its product boasts “nearly zero impurities.” The thing is, nature is no longer needed to provide the purity, and, more oddly, such purity in certain quantities might not be so good for you.