The freezer aisle of a major supermarket is a cutthroat place to stake a claim: the product, after all, is frozen water, so no retailer in its right mind is going to stock competing brands. Relationships with major retailers are king, and when The Ice Co didn't have them, it bought up the companies that did (most notably Polarcube, in 1997, which unlocked the coveted Asda account). A move into a new facility in 2006 allowed the growing company to move its production line into the 21st century – ice is now escorted through it by robots, untouched by human hand – and to solve the perennial problem of cold storage. Ice, unsurprisingly, is a seasonal product, and the laborious task of building up enough stock to survive the summer begins months ahead of time.

Then came an overextension: London. The capital proved inhospitable ground from the moment The Ice Co opened an office there in 2007: competition from Eskimo Ice ("king of the cube in London", The Ice Co begrudgingly admits) and a slew of other brands was robust. "It was very, very difficult to keep control of," Metcalfe said: "There was no loyalty." When The Ice Co entered London, ice was ￡7 per 12kg bag. Seven years later, it was ￡3.50. This price pressure, combined with the highly fragmented nature of the local market – dozens if not hundreds of individual businesses, as opposed to a handful of national retailers – proved too much of a challenge, and The Ice Co closed its London office in 2014.

By this point, though, there were other, more promising signals that things had started to change. To call what happened in the years following 2007's Great Recession the "British Ice Boom" is only overselling it insomuch as our consumption of ice still lags way behind the US. But it would be entirely fair to say that, in the UK, ice was finally starting to get cool.

When the American author Matt Yglesias ignited a Twitter firestorm by referring to Europe as "a continent where they don't have ice cubes" in September this year, he was in fact far from the first American to note the dearth of ice in continental beverages. In Notes from a Big Country (published 1998), Bill Bryson wrote about the various culture shocks he experienced after returning to the US after decades spent in the UK, chief among them "the staunch conviction that ice is not a luxury item". And in his 2001 New Yorker profile of the ice magnate James Stuart, "The Emperor of Ice", Ian Parker would compare the US's voracious demand for ice to that of Europe, a region "stuck at an earlier stage of development", citing the British capital as ground zero of ice parsimoniousness ("Few things are more amusing to an American iceman than a gin-and-tonic in a London pub: the grudging tongs, the single cube").