Nearly three out of four American households own an Igloo cooler. The brand is so woven into American summer that it's hard to remember anyone had to invent it. But somebody did, and they did it in Texas, for a very practical reason.
According to Igloo's official company history and Texas Highways magazine, Igloo started in 1947 as a metalworking shop in Houston. Its first product was not a cooler at all. It was a galvanized metal water jug, built so oil-field workers in the brutal Texas heat could have a clean, cold drink instead of dipping cups into shared wooden barrels. The jug was a hit.
The leap to the modern cooler came in 1962, when Igloo introduced its first all-plastic ice chest, a 48-quart model. Plastic was lighter, didn't rust, and held cold longer than metal. According to company materials, it was originally aimed at breweries, but sportsmen and families quickly took over.
Then came the cooler everyone knows. In 1971, Igloo introduced the Playmate, the little personal cooler with the tent-shaped, push-button lid. It earned the nickname "America's Lunchbox." The wheeled cooler followed in 1994.
The company has changed hands many times. Coca-Cola Bottling of New York owned it. So did Quaker Oats, MetLife, and a string of private equity firms. According to the Katy Times and Dometic's own announcement, the Swedish outdoor company Dometic Group bought Igloo in 2021 for $677 million.
The headquarters and main factory are still in Katy, Texas, west of Houston, where roughly 1,200 employees turn out about 16 million coolers a year. According to ABC News, that's about 55,000 every single day. Most are still made in America, eight decades after a metal shop tried to keep oil-field workers from getting too thirsty.
