The Wall Street Journal-20080130-Chew This Over- Munchable Ice Sells Like Hot Cakes- Fans Buy It by the Cup At Fast-Food Restaurants- Nugget Machine Was Key

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Chew This Over: Munchable Ice Sells Like Hot Cakes; Fans Buy It by the Cup At Fast-Food Restaurants; Nugget Machine Was Key

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When Kyle Burkhalter gets up in the morning, he goes into the kitchen and fixes himself a nice cup of ice.

The 24-year-old director of research for a Web site chews the ice in the car on his way to work in Atlanta. He downs two or three more cups before lunch. He orders ice from drive-thru windows and dips into the office ice machine. Sometimes, his tongue gets so numb he can barely talk to clients.

Still, he munches on. "It's something that you want to do and you think about doing on a constant basis," he says.

Ice isn't just for chilling drinks anymore, or for packing fish and treating sprains. It's a hot snack. Some Sonic Drive-In franchises sell it in cups and in bags to go. Ice-machine makers are competing to make the best chewable ice, with names like Chewblet, Nugget Ice and Pearl Ice. One manufacturer calls the ice-loving South the "Chew Belt."

Generally, more ice is sold during the summer, but people who compulsively chew ice do so whether it's hot or cold outside. One Sonic in Texas sold 13 10-pound bags, at $1.49 apiece, in one week this month.

Sales of machines that make easier-to-chew ice jumped about 23%, to 16,673 units in 2006 from 2003, according to data from the Air- Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute. Some ice chewers, including country-music star Vince Gill, have had the machines installed in their homes.

Ice chewers swap tips on Icechewing.com. A recipe for preparing the perfect cup of ice: Use a glass, not a plastic cup. Let crushed ice fuse in water. Drink the water. Shake the cup to loosen the ice. Dig in.

A member, identified as Rambling, responded, "I am drooling," and signed off, "I could chew Alaska."

Todd Robinson started the Web site in late 2003 after a message about ice-chewing on another site he ran generated more than 100 comments. Still, he thought Icechewing.com would be a flop. "I wasn't going to keep it that long, but then these people are really sincere," he says. Today, the site has 3,192 registered members and gets about 1,000 hits a day, he says.

Compulsive ice eating was observed at least as far back as the 1600s, according to "Pagophagia, or Compulsive Ice Consumption: a Historical Perspective," an academic article published in the journal Psychological Medicine in 1992. Lazarus Riverius, a French royal physician, described young women afflicted with an "evil" diet ingesting great quantities of snow and ice, among other things, according to the journal article.

The American Dental Association says that ice-chewing can damage teeth. "People have the right to do things that may hurt them," says Matt Messina, a dentist in Cleveland and spokesman for the association. "If something breaks, we'll fix it."

Today, obsessive ice chewing has been linked to iron deficiency, which afflicts about 2% of U.S. adult males and as many as 16% of young females between the ages of 16 and 19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Treating the deficiency -- whose link to ice eating is unclear -- tends to end the compulsive chewing for such people.

But many ice chewers say they just do it because they like to. Sometimes that leads to conflict with friends and family.

Jean Collins, a 44-year-old substitute teacher in Riverton, Wyo., says she chews through 10 to 14 28-ounce cups of shaved ice a day. "It's the first thing I did when I came home for lunch," she said in a phone interview.

She says her husband and three children have grown irritated by the frequent high-pitched whir of her ice-shaving machine -- and have threatened to destroy it. They've never followed through, but she has worn out four or five of the machines.

Ms. Collins's best friend, Nancy James, 52, notes another downside. "She spends more time in the bathroom than anyone else in the world," she says.

Chomping ice took a new shape when Scotsman Ice Systems, today a unit of food equipment giant Enodis PLC, introduced its nugget ice machine in 1981.

The company had been looking for an alternative to its shaved ice, which tended to gum up ice machines in hospitals and nursing homes, says Robert Utter, a retired Scotsman engineer who helped develop the new machine. The result was nugget ice, which resembles compacted snow flakes.

Traditional ice machines freeze water on a plate, forming a substance as hard as a jawbreaker. In a nugget ice machine, an auger sits in the center of a refrigerated cylinder filled with water. As ice crystals begin to form, the auger pushes the wet, pliable ice through holes comparable to those in a meat grinder.

"We knew that it was the right consistency" for easily exiting the device -- "crunchy but not hard," says Mr. Utter, now 74. "We didn't really know it was going to be such a hit."

Sonic Corp., the big drive-in sandwich chain, switched to Scotsman nugget ice machines more than 20 years ago -- a development that gave chewable ice a much bigger profile.

Also known as "cubelets" or "Sonic ice," the fluffy pellets are sold at many Sonic franchises by the cup or the 10-pound bag. "Until I started working for Sonic, I didn't realize people were that nuts about ice," says Paul Pollok, a partner at a store in San Antonio.

Last summer, Mr. Pollok's 24-hour restaurant bought cubed ice for three months after its aging nugget ice machines had worn out. "I had people screaming at me because I didn't have chewable ice," he says. He has two new nugget ice machines now.

Taco Time Northwest, a chain of 74 fast-food Mexican restaurants in the Seattle area, considers the crunchy chunks part of its brand.

One recent day at a Taco Time south of Seattle, TZ Riggins ordered four, 32-ounce cups of ice in a cardboard carrier. Total cost: $1. The 68-year-old cook at a senior-citizens home grabbed a black plastic spoon and started scooping ice into his mouth.

"It's very, very, very good," he said. Mr. Riggins says he picked up the habit about three years ago when his brother began undergoing kidney dialysis and was encouraged to suck on ice cubes rather than drink a lot of water. Now, Mr. Riggins has a $5-a-week habit. "Sometimes, I come in here and get a bucket," he said.

For some people, going to a restaurant for the perfect ice is too much trouble. A few years ago, the singer Amy Grant wanted to find the perfect Christmas gift for her husband, Mr. Gill, the country-music star. She had a Scotsman machine costing several thousand dollars installed in their garage in Nashville.

"I've chewed ice my whole life," says the 50-year-old Mr. Gill. Growing up in Oklahoma, he says, he judged restaurants by the quality of their ice. Today, he says, when he travels outside the U.S., he finds slim pickings.

"Europe is a drag," he says. "I ask for ice, and they give me one or two cubes. They're stingy with their ice. I'd never survive there."