This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Richard Boccato, owner and operator of Hundredweight Ice in Queens, New York City. It has been edited for length and clarity.
For years, I made my living bartending in New York City. I recognized early on that ice was perhaps the most important and overlooked ingredient in the modern cocktail.
If you’re going to take measures to use fresh ingredients, squeeze your juice à la minute (just before serving), make your syrups in-house, procure the finest spirits, and then marry all of that to an inferior quality of frozen water, it would amount to a fool’s errand in the glass, especially in exchange for top American dollar.
That said, never, at any point when I was bartending, would I have imagined that I would one day be a business owner of an ice company. My path to becoming an ice man began with a freezer full of rust-colored ice.
How I became the ice man
While bartending at two of the best bars in New York City, I was fortunate to rise through the ranks enough that the owner of those bars asked me if I wanted to go into business with him and open a bar together. We called it Dutch Kills.
When the day came to get ready to open Dutch Kills for the first time in 2009, I opened the chest freezer and saw a rust-colored, reddish-brown block of cloudy ice. The pipes coming into the building were not suitable for the quality of water that I wanted to serve, so instead I decided to source crystal-clear blocks of ice from a local ice sculptor.
Customers were immediately impressed by the opulence, beauty, and clarity of the sourced ice. Ultimately, we were making enough money as a business that it seemed viable to reinvest some of it in our own ice block maker.
At the time, though, I was only interested in making enough ice for our bar, not starting a business with it. By 2011, however, word had gotten around about the quality of our drinks, and a lot of bars were interested in obtaining ice from us.
I didn’t have the money or the infrastructure to launch a cocktail ice business, but I decided to do it anyway. I called it Hundredweight Ice.
The early days involved chainsaws and irons
The way that we used to make our ice is vastly different from how we make it today.
In the early days, it was me, Pedro, my first full-time employee, and Ian, my business partner, in the back of Dutch Kills, breaking down 300-pound blocks of crystal-clear ice with chainsaws and finishing the cubes by creasing all six sides with clothing irons to achieve smooth surfaces and clean edges.
Obviously, our techniques and practices weren’t sophisticated at all in the beginning. If I had been an outsider walking into the storage room of that bar and saw the setup we were working with, I’d have thought, “These people have no chance of survival.”
Many of my industry peers and former co-workers did, in fact, tell me that I was crazy for thinking this would ever work.
Over the years, we kept making ice and the business kept growing. I had to stop bartending and focus my attention on the ice business. At a certain point, it dawned on me that I wasn’t a full-time bartender anymore. I was an ice man now, and that was somewhat of a difficult and unexpected career transition to accept, but it was also very empowering because it meant we had succeeded in doing what we had set out to do.
By 2017, Hundredweight had grown so much that we could no longer sustain the business in the back of Dutch Kills. We found a 5,000-square-foot warehouse a few miles away, which we operated until the shutdown and the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic decimated the hospitality industry.
We were forced to move the ice business back into the back house of Dutch Kills. We struggled from ruin to recovery, and toward the end of 2021, we broke ground on a new warehouse just a stone’s throw from the old one, which is still where we make our ice today — having just expanded to an additional 3,000 square feet next door.
We’re more successful than ever, but the work is demanding
We now deliver ice to over 20 Michelin-starred restaurants, and our clients in New York City number in the triple digits.
In 2025, our revenue was close to $3 million, and we are on track to significantly surpass that in 2026, with projected revenue of $3.5 million.
We start our days between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. and finish by about 3 p.m. We cut about 15,000 2-inch cubes of ice per day and harvest over 3 million pounds of ice each year.
The investment is tremendous, but necessary to achieve the final product. For example, the upfront costs for some of the equipment include:
- $5,000 to $7,000 for each ice-making machine
- $5,000 to $20,000 for bandsaws that do the cutting
- $50,000 to $75,000 for the CNC router that custom-etches the ice
- $80,000 to $90,000 for transport vans
One thing we’re proud of is that we haven’t raised our prices a penny since 2017. A 50-pack of 2-inch cubes sells for $30. Logo cubes average about $100 per pack.
The only reason this company exists is because we wanted to make our cocktails at Dutch Kills the best they could be. I didn’t expect that it would turn into the business that it is now.
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