Would you spend $32 on ice cubes? Grocery store’s price outrages customers: ‘Tastes like water’
At Erewhon, the price for ice is making some customers freeze in their tracks.
The California luxury market is peddling a bag of eight large, frozen spheres for a whopping $32, a price tag that has bewildered shoppers unfamiliar with the ice’s purpose: cocktails.
Produced by the brand Penny Pound Ice, the “ballz,” as they’re called, are not meant to be used in your Stanley tumbler — unless you’re fancy like that — and instead are intended to be placed alone in an alcoholic beverage, like an Old Fashioned or Negroni.
“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,” Gordon Bellaver, a Penny Pound partner since 2014, told Eater.
He added: “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.”
The California company — which sought to bring the art of high quality ice to the forefront of people’s minds, rather than remaining an “afterthought,” Bellaver said — also manufactures ice of various shapes, including miniature spheres called “pebbles,” diamonds, cubes, pyramids, spears and blocks that contain thyme, edible orchids and even gold flakes.
The viral “ballz,” however, are sold directly from Penny Pound Ice for a meager $28, $4 less than the cost at Erewhon.
While aghast viewers online maintained that the price tag is preposterous — calling the celebrity grocer “out of touch” and the product “crazy” — others were eager to swipe their card, captivated by the clarity of the ice orbs once wet.
“This looks like a crystal ball,” TikToker Lizzie Dushaj said in a recent video, appearing dazzled by the “beautiful” ice ball that shockingly didn’t melt after 20 minutes of sitting in her kitchen sink, which Bellaver says is due to the density of the ice.
It’s just not the same as the ice that your freezer or trays can produce, said Bellaver. In short, it’s about “the water you’re starting with.”
At home, your ice tends to be foggy or cloudy due to impurities in tap water, such as calcium and magnesium, as well as any flavors that exist in the freezer that then are infused in the ice.
Penny Pound Ice, however, uses constantly agitating water that doesn’t allow for impurities to settle, and instead, they rise to the top and are removed, “leaving a clear 300-pound block of ice” that is cut to be the final product.
$32 for something that “tastes like water,” as many TikTokers put it, may seem unreasonable, but Bellaver reminded consumers that there is a method — artistry, if you will — to their madness.
Where the frozen cubes are complete after being sawed into shape, the spheres require further steps to be molded into perfect globes, which are produced either with a drill press or metal mold and then compressed into ice cubes of different 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,” he explained. “The raw material going into the product is already more than what the cubes are.”
Not to mention, “labor in Los Angeles is expensive,” he noted.
Despite the online vitriol surrounding seemingly outlandish products and the absurdity of Erewhon pricing — from the $19 Hailey Bieber smoothie to $26 Hyper Oxygenated Water — the ice cube criticism is water off Bellaver’s back.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
