Weights for Igloo Marine Ultra options range from 1.5 to 3 lbs., making it easy to carry over your shoulder. Color options include white and navy or gray and seafoam, emphasizing design for trips on lakes or at beaches. With better insulation, a cooler can maintain lower temperatures for longer, thus consuming less ice. That’s important, especially if you, like most people, don’t have a freezer that can produce enough ice to fill a cooler and you tend to resort to buying bags of ice from the grocery store or liquor store.
The competition for the Trailmate consists of rotomolded coolers with superior ice retention. When shopping for a soft cooler, always look for leak-resistant or waterproof closure. But the lack of the rigid bottom means it flops around igloo water cooler when you’re not pulling it. However, if you’re looking to spend up on a luxury soft cooler, the Yeti Hopper Flip 18 is a heavy-duty choice for holding ice. We also wanted to pick a diverse list is prices, functions, and specialties.
We didn’t throw this backpack cooler off the side of a mountain (yet), but we probably could, and it’d be fine. Icemule’s Boss Backpack Cooler is incredibly rugged and has some serious insulation. “The design reminds me of a single big backpack that people use for backpack travel,” is how one of our testers put it. Icemule uses proprietary fabrics, welded seams, and extra-padded straps to make this one heavy-duty yet comfortable backpack. Our testers loved this pack’s comfort compared to other large backpack coolers, thanks mainly to the extra padding and chest and waist straps. If you’re looking for a collapsible and durable option at a more affordable cost, we highly recommend the Icemule Classic.
With Igloo’s soft coolers, you have plenty of choices, depending on the situation. While all of these soft coolers have a touch of black on the outside, the three main choices for colors are agama teal, blaze red and acid green. Each bag weighs less than 1 lb., and storage space ranges from six to 36 cans.
On a related note, comfortable shoulder straps and/or grab handles can go a long way toward maximizing portability, which we outline more in depth below. The IceMule Pro doesn’t deliver multiple days of extreme ice retention, but it’s enough to get you through a hot day. When emptied, it’s much more collapsible than stiffer softer coolers meant to retain ice for multiple days—an important feature when conserving space in a boat or on a pack. Stiffer soft coolers are not collapsible and take up the same amount of space regardless of whether they’re in use.
This makes it particularly great for activities like kayaking or paddle boarding when it might be exposed to a lot of water. It also floats, which provides added assurance should conditions get rougher than expected. RTIC’s Soft Pack also falls into this category, and although it’s technically not fully waterproof, the tough shell and leakproof design should stand up well if it ends up taking a dip. While the can measurement igloo trailmate standard is helpful, keep in mind you’ll need to devote at least some of that volume to ice. The amount of ice you put in a cooler is totally subjective and depends on how cold you want the cooler’s contents and the conditions and temperatures in which you’ll be taking the cooler. Just make sure to read the specs carefully and assume that max can carrying capacity listed is for only cans in most cases.
For example, YETI’s hard-sided Tundra series is covered with a five-year warranty compared to three for the Hopper collection. The opening style and closure system of a soft-sided cooler may not seem all that important, but we can tell you firsthand that it will have a sizable impact on both convenience and overall performance. Engel’s HD30, for instance, has a fairly narrow opening that’s stiff and requires considerable effort to keep open while loading and unloading food and drinks (the welded zipper doesn’t help). When testing soft coolers, we focused on performance, capacity, and how comfortable each is to carry.
Most soft coolers focus on toting cans and measure their capacities in can increments. However, the RovR KeepR focuses on mixology with an open-top bar cart soft cooler designed to mix drinks away from home, whether at camp on the beach or on a boat. Unlike most soft coolers, the KeepR is more of a cocktail caddy built around the IceR double-wall stainless steel ice bucket. However, we recommend buying the sold-separately ChillR ice pack inserts, which slide into the compartments to keep bottles cold for shorter periods.