Best Coolers of 2025: Camping and Trips to the Beach Have Never Been Better

The big differentiator that you'll hear a lot about as you shop for a cooler is ice retention -- specifically, how long a cooler can keep a full load of ice frozen (melted ice, a.k.a. water, isn't as good at keeping drinks cold). The new, expensive options all hang their hat on this test, with roto-molded coolers specifically designed to ace it (and in doing so, to justify their price tags). That's all well and good, but I worried that a standard ice retention test on its own wouldn't tell us the whole story. Sure, some coolers would probably keep the ice frozen for a lot longer than others, but using the melting point as your metric seems to disregard everything that comes before. I wanted to get a good sense of performance, not just after days but in hours, before any of the ice had even melted. To do that, I started with a modified version of the ice retention test. Instead of a full load of ice in each cooler, I went with an amount of ice equivalent to 10% of each cooler's total ... Read full article.