A foam thickness is not a performance figure.

Why we exist

Cooler bags get quoted on foam thickness and a printed panel, from suppliers who have never opened one up.

So the zip has no flap and the bag loses hours through a straight-line gap across its top. The seams are unbound, bridging inside to outside all the way round. The liner is stitched in with square corners, so it cannot be cleaned and the bag smells within a year. And a foil-lined giveaway gets sold with a claim borrowed from a properly built one.

Cold leaves at the zip and the seams

The insulating panel is the easy part of a cooler bag. The hard parts are the openings.

A zip is a continuous gap running the width of the bag; an unbound seam is a bridge from the cold side to the warm side. An insulated flap over the zip and taped or bound seams are what make the hours figure achievable, and they are the first two things a cheap bag leaves out because neither is visible in a photograph.

The liner decides whether it can be cleaned

A heat-sealed liner with radiused corners wipes out completely. There is nowhere for liquid to sit.

A liner stitched in with square corners traps liquid in the stitch holes and the corners, cannot be cleaned properly, and is the entire reason an old cooler bag smells. It is also the difference between water resistant and genuinely leakproof: leakproof means a welded liner with no stitch holes below the fill line, and we only use the word for that.

Geometry, which nobody mentions

Small bags lose cold fastest, because a small bag has far more outside surface per unit of contents. A lunch bag is working harder than a family cooler, not less hard.

A cooler backpack has its own version of the problem: your back is a heat source pressed against the cold compartment for the whole walk, which is why the back panel needs a spacer rather than a single layer of fabric.

What we say about food

A soft cooler is not a refrigerator. Food safety is a matter of time and temperature, and the honest thing is to give the hours rather than imply indefinite cold.

That is also why we quote capacity in cans plus ice rather than in litres alone: without the ice, the hours figure does not apply.

How we price

No dollar figures on this site. Price moves with construction, liner type, size and quantity, and it falls steeply at retail and supermarket volumes. Send the details and a real quote comes back the same day, with a lowest-price guarantee if you are already holding a cheaper one.

What we will talk you out of

A leakproof welded liner on a lunch bag. A performance claim on a non-woven giveaway. An open-topped bottle sleeve sold as a cooler. And any spec sheet whose only number is a foam thickness.

Every one of those costs us money to say and saves you more.

How we work

Who we serve