The ice in your drink comes from one of two places: your freezer, or someone else’s. For homemade ice, the supply chain is reassuringly familiar: water goes into the freezer, and a bit later, ice comes out. But what about the ice cubes that you bought from a supermarket, or extracted, by the handful, from a plastic bag at a drinks party? They were frozen when you took possession of them; they are long gone now. Where did they start out, back when they were water?

Follow their journey all the way back from the point of sale – through warehouses and depots and cold storage facilities and innumerable temperature-controlled lorries – and there’s a decent chance that most of them came from the same place: an industrial estate just outside South Kirkby in West Yorkshire. The company that made them is called The Ice Co, and if you haven’t heard of it, you have almost certainly used its products.

If you have grabbed a bag of ice from the freezer of a corner shop on a hot day, The Ice Co probably supplied it. If you have bought ice from Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Morrisons or Ocado, The Ice Co thanks you for your business. If you have ever plonked a bottle of prosecco into a house party ice bucket filled with cylindrical cubes, or pulled a cold can of Coke from the chilling bins at Glastonbury, or – indeed – endured the Arctic Enema ice bath obstacle at a Tough Mudder endurance course, it is highly likely that the ice originated in The Ice Co’s ice factory, a long, flat building nestled in the countryside between Doncaster and Leeds.

Like central heating and hot water, ice is one of those minor luxuries we scarcely think to notice. And yet The Ice Co has turned frozen water into a £38m brand – at a retail price of roughly £1 a bag, that equates to plenty of people indulging every year.

It is perhaps surprising that there is even a market for packaged ice in the UK – let alone one that requires The Ice Co to produce 400 tonnes of the stuff per day, or 5bn cubes per year. We do not lack the specialised equipment required to make our own ice: 98% of British homes contain some form of freezer. We do not, as a rule, have issues with our drinking water, so freezing our own in plastic or silicone trays is not unsafe. While British summers can be warm, they are nothing like summer in the southern US’s so-called Sun Belt, the modern ice trade’s heartland, where the largest operators produce over 1bn cubes a day. We do not, strictly speaking, even need ice in our drinks – no one does! – which means that we must have acquired a taste for it; so much so, over the years, that we are now willing to pay for the privilege.

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.