HydroPure™ Water ice pack – 1 Pocket – 500g

Water, Not Gel.

If water delivers the cooling, why add the gel?

That question is the whole of HydroPure™. Water is nature’s finest thermal battery. It stores cold energy when frozen and releases it steadily during transit. It is also what most gel packs rely on to do their cooling in the first place. The gel is a thickener. It does not cool your product, it just makes the water harder to dispose of.

HydroPure removes it.

Same cooling. Simpler pack.

HydroPure has been curve-tested against a like-for-like gel pack in identical insulated boxes under identical chamber conditions over a full 48 hours. The two track within a fraction of a degree of each other and cross the 8°C threshold at the same point. You give up nothing on performance.

What you gain is everything that happens after the pack has done its job.

A cleaner end-of-life story

Gel creates a poor end-of-life story, and it is a story your customer has to deal with, not you. End users are frequently unsure how to dispose of a gel pack. It should not go down the sink, because gel can swell and accumulate in pipework, increasing the risk of sink and drain blockages. If polymer-based gel is misdisposed of into drains or waste streams it can bypass treatment routes, and once released it is difficult to recover. Controlled disposal or incineration may be the only realistic end route.

Persistent polymer waste also feeds directly into the wider concern around environmental plastics and microplastics, a conversation your customers are already having whether or not your packaging is part of it.

HydroPure avoids the gel fill entirely. The film is recyclable LDPE, and flexible film is already collected at front-of-store recycling points at major UK supermarkets. Mandatory kerbside collection of flexible plastics in England has been pushed back to April 2030, so front-of-store remains the route for the time being.

Lower packaging liability

Under current EPR rules, gel fill is chargeable. Water is not.

Hydropac has written confirmation from Valpak, one of the UK’s longest-established packaging compliance schemes, that water-filled and gel-filled ice packs are reported differently. For a water-filled pack, only the plastic film is reported as packaging and the water content is excluded. For a gel-filled pack, the film is reported as plastic and the gel content is reported separately under the “other materials” category. Where the pack is classified as household packaging, both of those weights feed into the disposal fee you pay.

The difference is not marginal. Based on current fee rates, a 500g water pack such as HydroPure attracts a disposal fee of around 0.66p per unit, against roughly 14.4p for an equivalent gel pack. That is about 13.75p on every single gel pack you ship. At 100,000 packs a year it is close to £13,750. At a million packs it is over £137,000.

Same cooling function, lower packaging liability, and a cleaner line to defend when a customer asks what is actually inside the pack you have sent them.

An ice pack designed with purpose

Customers squeeze an ice pack to judge whether it feels fully frozen. It is a poor test. Traditional gel packs are usually white by design, which masks the visual effect of freezing and makes it hard to know whether packs are truly frozen to the core.

On HydroPure, the white cracked-ice design, the icons and the wording are intentionally transparent when the pack is unfrozen. When those transparent areas turn solid white, that is your visual confirmation that the pack is frozen through to its core. Less guessing at pack-out. More confidence that what leaves your door will perform.

And because the pack carries its own messaging, it does a second job once it arrives. Your customer opens the box and reads the reason the packaging is the way it is.

Why is the pack black?

Because that is exactly what an ice pack should be. A black pack absorbs heat, and absorbing heat, then giving up its stored cold energy, is the entire function of an ice pack. The colour is doing work, not just looking good.

Built to the same Hydropac standard

HydroPure is produced on the same machinery, from the same unique material blend, and to the same quality standards as every other Hydropac pack. Our own ‘Seal through Liquid’ technology and accurate dosing system fill each pack to capacity, every time. Every batch passes a 3-stage filtration process (softened, chlorinated and UV light treated), and quality-controlled samples from every single production run are sent to an independent laboratory for microbiological testing.

Simple. Safe. Effective.