Earlier ice industry

In the 1820s Frederick Tudor started his business harvesting ice from New England ponds and sold them packed with sawdust to the South, the Carribean, and Europe. Eventually it became a global business empire that shipped ice all the way to India.

Theoritically this industry was possible anywhere that has ice in the winters and decent ships. So what impact would it have if the ice industry existed in earlier times - say Roman Empire, Middle Ages, Song dynasty, etc? Ice wasn't just useful for making ice cream and frozen drinks of course, the ice box was an early form of refrigeration which kept food fresh for days instead of hours.
 
In the 1820s Frederick Tudor started his business harvesting ice from New England ponds and sold them packed with sawdust to the South, the Carribean, and Europe. Eventually it became a global business empire that shipped ice all the way to India.

Theoritically this industry was possible anywhere that has ice in the winters and decent ships. So what impact would it have if the ice industry existed in earlier times - say Roman Empire, Middle Ages, Song dynasty, etc? Ice wasn't just useful for making ice cream and frozen drinks of course, the ice box was an early form of refrigeration which kept food fresh for days instead of hours.

Wouldn't slower transportation times really limit this? The speed of shipping was increasing rapidly throughout the 19th century.

For example, ocean voyages that took weeks by the late 19th century had taken months a hundred years earlier. Same goes for coastal shipping. Roads prior to modern times were generally terrible. I remember reading somewhere that it could take weeks to travel by road between two English cities in the 18th century, because European roads were so bad even at that late of date.
 
Shipping ice in the 19th century was done with sailing ships for decades before steam came along. From what I understand it wasn't the speed of transport that mattered, but the size of the cargo.

Icebergs at sea would take decades to melt because they had thousands of tons of mass. Pond ice taks days to melt because it's very thin, but if you drag them out and stacked them into a bloc weighing a hundred tons and insulated it in a ice house it would last until summer.

I still remember using metal lined iceboxes. It's amazing how quickly people forgot how integral these things were in daily use. In the US every family had one even in the 1930s, and elsewhere in the world they lasted well into the 1980s.
 
Of course, it helped that this was the Little Ice Age, and the ponds and lakes froze harder, quicker and thicker than before or after. But, still....
 
The Roman Empire did this in antiquity, harvesting ice in the Appenines and storing it in the city till summer.
 
It was done quite routinely at the local level (a lot of the 'dungeons' tourists get shown in German castles are actually ice cellars), but the idea of scaling it up into an international trading operation is probably not viable before the eighteenth century. It ties up so much capital and is subject to such risks that I can't see it earlier. At least not in the Atlantic economy. I could imagine ice ships from Korea or Manchuria making for summery Guangzhou.
 
I think the reason Tudor was successful was more due to his entrepreneurial innovations than anything else. Two that stand out are his efforts to create a demand by sending people out to teach customers what to do with ice, and loading his ice ships with apples so he was selling fruit to improve profit margin.

New England was an importer of bulk goods like cotton from the South. They had ships coming in loaded with cargo and leaving empty. Ice and apples makes a great combination to fill those empty hulls. Something similar was happening with the ships in the Med with Romans importing grain from North Africa and South China shipping rice north. They just had to get ice to fetch a higher return than whatever the return cargo was.

Creating demand is just as important. People in cold areas may have institutional knowledge of storing ice for the Summer, but those in hot climates will have to learn it from outsiders.
 
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