The Ice Co is not only dominant in its own marketplace. As a supplier of a perishable good to major retailers, it is evaluated alongside – and frequently outperforms – some of the UK's most dynamic food and drink brands. Indeed, it recently beat out enterprises such as the "100% plant-based" food company Fullgreen and the premium bar-snack provider Made For Drink to land SME brand of the year at the prestigious Grocer Gold Awards. Those companies, just like former winners Fever-Tree, have something that can be evaluated relative to the competition, whether it be superior flavour, a distinctive brand personality or a clearly identifiable ethical stance.

Ice, though, has no rough edges on which a consumer's imagination can find purchase. "Chaste as ice," Shakespeare wrote. "The simplest solid thing you can buy in the supermarket," noted a modern historian of the subject. Ice is perhaps the most purely fungible product any of us will ever buy: if it's clear, fits into a glass, and is solid at the freezing point of water, it has fulfilled the only meaningful criteria that most end users will ever care about.

And so, as much as the Ice Co's success is a result of technological innovation, and of shrewdly moving in step with evolving tastes, it is also a story of near-constant struggle, as generations of icemen and icewomen have sought out ways to sell people something that has only ever been, and will only ever be, frozen water. That The Ice Co has done it on such a large scale is doubly remarkable: ice is not just featureless, it is also evanescent. How do you build an empire out of something born to melt?

Kept below zero, ice is rock-hard, unchanging. Once it reaches its melting point, though, in a textbook example of entropy, its molecules start to agitate and chafe within their crystalline lattice, until they finally slip their hydrogen bonds and become what ice unfailingly returns to: a puddle of water.

For centuries, the history of ice was really just the history of attempting to postpone the inevitable. The enterprising hacked the stuff from icebergs and lakes and mountaintops; they transported it at no little personal risk to the houses of the rich, who constructed ice houses and ice safes in which to hoard their treasure.

The economics of transporting something very heavy and highly perishable meant that ice long remained an unattainable luxury for all but the most wealthy. Ancient potentates flaunted ice as a status symbol: in China, during the Eastern Chou dynasty, an "ice-service" detail of 94 people was kept on hand to handle any ice-related business that may occur, from chilling beverages to chilling corpses. Pliny ascribes to the Emperor Nero the invention of the ice bucket, as a method of cooling wine without diluting it with ice that had been stored in pungent straw and cloth. In 17th-century Florence, the Medici family would host elaborate feasts featuring tabletop mountain ranges sculpted from ice (they also acted as patrons to the polymath Bernardo Buontalenti, the pioneer of modern-day ice-cream).