Home City Ice
Home City Ice is an industry leading, full service ice company. Our goal is to continually improve our product and service to meet and exceed our customers' expectations. We have experienced many changes throughout our history before becoming the multi-million dollar company we are today. And through it all, the Sedler family has continued to own and operate Home City Ice.
1890s
Home City Ice's origins begin with William Ruskamp, who first located the business on South Side Avenue in Riverside in 1896. By 1900, he moved the company to Mississippi Avenue in Riverside. In that same year, William J. Holthingrichs bought the company from Ruskamp and named it the Riverside Ice Company.
1910s
In 1910, Holthingrichs renamed the company The Home City Ice and Coal Company, taking the name of a nearby neighborhood, Home City, OH (which is today Saylor Park). In 1911, Gottlieb Hartweg bought the business and moved it to Ivanhoe Avenue in Home City, OH the next year. Harweg's son Fred inherited the business upon his father's death in 1924.
1920s
Beginning in the early 1920s, Frank Sedler, a self-taught engineer who sold cooling machinery for the York Refrigeration Company, began making sales calls to the Home City Ice Company, Determined to convert the company's machinery from steam-powered cooling equipment to electric.
1924
Sedler purchased capital stock in Home City Ice when it incorporated in 1924. He sold his home and invested $4,000 in the Home City Ice Company. He was elected president in 1924 because of his vast technical knowledge. Frank proceeded to modernize the company and changed the focus of the company to concentrate solely on ice production and delivery.
1928
The Home City Ice Company's sales and profits grew each year. In 1928, the Home City Ice Company purchased an ice-making plant in Aurora, Indiana and expanded to serve Southeastern Indiana in addition to western Cincinnati.
1930s
The Home City Ice Company had a few commercial accounts during the early years of its history, but the majority of the company's business came from home deliveries. Before electric refrigerators were inexpensive and readily available, people kept their perishables in iceboxes, cooled by large blocks of ice, usually cut from lakes and streams in the winter months.
1950s
After the war, consumers began to buy the new electric refrigerators, causing Home City Ice's home delivery sales to slowly decline. Home City Ice relied on its commercial accounts to gain profits. A boost in sales came with the coin-operated ice-dispensing machine, which Home City Ice placed in areas outside of its traditional market during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
1960s
In 1962, Home City Ice began replacing the ice-dispensing machines with the "ice merchandisers" seen today. Home City Ice gained a contract to place these ice merchandisers, which sell bags of crushed ice, outside of area King Kwik stores beginning in 1962. As King Kwik expanded, so did Home City Ice, allowing their market to spread across Indiana and Southwest Ohio.
1970s
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Home City Ice Company purchased Latonia Ice in Kentucky, Valley Ice in Hamilton, and Middletown Ice as well as some other smaller firms.
1980s
In the 1980s, Home City Ice purchased Murray Ice and Coal in Columbus, Stockton Ice in Portsmouth and Columbus, City Products in Cincinnati and Columbus, and GICO in Gallipolis.
1990
In 1990, Home City Ice acquired the Diamond Ice Company in Toledo. Home City Ice has continued its growth trend throughout the 1990s, and continues to be an industry leader and the largest privately owned ice company in the country.
1990s
Throughout the 1990s, Home City Ice produced commercials as "The Perfect Picnic Partners" along with JTM. Click here to visit our our Home City Ice History channel on YouTube.
2000
In 2000, Home City Ice once again continued its growth, this time with the acquisition of Polar Ice, which covers the states of Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, and Illinois.
Today
Home City Ice retails ice across all of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and West Virginia, as well as parts of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, New York, and Maryland. Home City Ice manufactures 4,400 tons of ice per day in 28 state-of-the-art manufacturing plants and 36 distribution centers throughout the Midwest.
145 tons
On average, each one of Home City Ice's plants can produce up to 145 tons of ice a day. That's equivalent to 15 elephants. Combine all 28 production facilities and that's 4,400 tons a DAY or about 500 elephants!
25 miles
Almost 80% of the customers we service are within a 25 mile radius of a distribution point allowing for quick, reliable and efficient service.
28 facilities
Home City Ice operates 28 facilities across 8 states. No one facility represents more than 5% of HCI's total capacity allowing for a reliable source of supply in case of mechanical failure, power outage or water advisories.
66 freezers
Home City Ice stocks up on ice in 66 freezers across the region, so you don't run out of ice.
7 days a week
Our production facilities are up and running every day of the week and even sometimes through the night. That's to make sure you get as much ice as you need when you need it.
1000 pounds
Home City Ice can produce bags of ice as small as 3 lbs, and as large as 1000 lbs. Whoa, now that's a big bag of ice!
725 vehicles
Home City Ice has a fleet of over 725 vehicles available to serve our customers every day of the year.
4th of July
Going into the 4th of July Holiday, Home City Ice will have almost 20,000 pallets of finished product available for immediate distribution to our customers.
100%
In 2008, over 400 packaged ice production facilities were inspected by NSF certified inspectors and only 11 received perfect scores of 100%. Home City Ice was awarded 8 of the 11 perfect scores.
It Floats
Did you know that water is the only known substance where the solid state (ice) will float in the liquid state (water)?
38x
Did you know that it takes 1 calorie of energy to reduce one gram of water one degree, but it takes 38x that amount of energy to turn one gram of water into one gram of ice?
Carbon Footprint
Our unique production methods, the location of our distribution points, and our state of the art routing technologies allow HCI to have one of the smallest carbon footprints per unit in the packaged ice industry.
Natural Filtration
Our unique freezing process creates ice that is more pure than the water it's made from. It's called "natural filtration".
1924
The Sedler family started Home City Ice in 1924. Over this history, Home City Ice has successfully become the largest family owned and operated packaged ice company in the nation.
