Facts about ice as a food

• Every food code in the U.S. and Canada defines ice as a food yet there is little oversight. As a Packaged Food Product, ice is not only important for consumers maintaining today’s active lifestyle and health.
• Packaged ice is critical for Emergency Relief Operations. IPIA member packaged ice manufacturing companies respond with efficiency and speed to provide a quality and safe food product in coordination with emergency relief operations. The packaged ice industry provides millions of pounds of ice in response to natural and man-made disasters each year
• Most people believe that Bottled Water and Packaged Ice meet the same rigorous quality and safety standards. This is most certainly not the case.
• In industrial ice plants, ice is generated in large capacity machines that package the ice automatically where there is no human contact. However, 50-60% percent of all packaged ice sold in the U.S. and Canada is produced on-premises at supermarkets, gas stations, liquor stores, campgrounds and other retail and wholesale outlets. These packaged ice producers (non IPIA plants) which are in thousands of locations nationwide producing millions of bags of ice annually neither meet any standards nor are they adequately inspected. If these outlets bottled and sold the water they are using to produce ice, they would need to meet the FDA bottled water regulations in order to package that water on premise for sale to the customer. The same should hold true of packaged frozen water.