The Digitalisation of Dry Ice
Our CEO Ruth Kearney visits Ireland’s leading dry ice supplier, Polar Ice.
A Brief History of Polar Ice
Polar Ice is a family run business established in 1996, they are the leading manufacturer and supplier of Dry Ice in Northern Ireland. They began with two employees and now have a team of seventeen people. Due to their hard work and dedication they have achieved an impressive market growth of over 800%.
Alison Ritchie is the managing director of Polar Ice, she helped to set up the company alongside her father and two brothers. In 2013, Polar Ice invested in food grade manufacturing and are certified to BRC v8 and ISO9001:2015. Due to consistently striving to achieve the highest grade in their BRC Quality audits, they are the approved dry ice supplier to some of the country’s top meat processors and food suppliers. To ensure their high standards are maintained, Polar ice employ their own quality assurance experts and operate a clean room manufacturing environment to prevent any physical, chemical, or microbial contaminants in their dry ice. As a result of their exacting standards, Polar Ice have received recognition for their achievements in several industry awards including the Ulster Bank Business Achievers Award 2015 - Winner of Women Led Business in Leinster.
Why Is Dry Ice So Important?
Among Polar Ice’s many customers, pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer use their dry ice in their shipping containers to transport drugs required to be stored at continuously low temperatures. Aer Lingus also uses dry ice provided by Polar Ice in their onboard catering storage units. Further examples include medical uses such as hospitals and labs to store samples and the Irish Blood Transfusion Service to transport vital plasma products. Whilst there are a number of industries that use dry ice, Polar Ice manufactures a range of products including blocks, slices, and pellets with custom-sized dry ice products on request making it a unique experience tailored to the client.
We are looking forward to working with Polar Ice as their digital partner and supporting them on their digitalisation journey made possible with our digitalisation voucher. To find out more about our products check out our website or book a call to see how digitalisation could help your business.
What Digitalisation Looks Like for a Specialist Manufacturer
Polar Ice isn’t your typical manufacturer. They operate in food-grade conditions, hold BRC v8 and ISO 9001:2015 certification, and supply pharmaceutical clients including Pfizer. Their products go into cold chain logistics for medical-grade drugs that must be stored at continuously low temperatures. The stakes are high.
That level of compliance means their quality management processes are demanding. Every batch of dry ice they produce must be traceable. Every cleaning record must be accessible. Every supplier must be verified and documented. When an auditor walks in — and for BRC v8, they will — the documentation must be complete, accurate, and findable.
That’s a lot of paperwork. Or it was.
Moving from paper to digital records
Manual recording in a food-grade environment creates risk. Paper gets wet. Ink smudges. Records get misfiled. People forget to fill in a form at the end of a shift.
Digital tools remove most of that risk. When your team logs a temperature reading on a tablet, it’s timestamped and stored automatically. When a batch is traced back for a customer query, the record is there in seconds. When an auditor asks for the last six months of cleaning logs, you don’t spend two hours pulling files from a cabinet.
For a manufacturer with pharmaceutical clients who expect zero-defect supply chains, this isn’t just efficiency. It’s brand protection.
Cold chain logistics and traceability
Polar Ice supplies dry ice for pharmaceutical cold chain logistics — where product traceability isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a regulatory requirement. Pharmaceutical clients like Pfizer have strict supplier qualification processes. Being able to demonstrate rigorous digital records and full traceability is part of maintaining those relationships.
As Polar Ice grows, the manual approach to records and traceability will become a bottleneck. A team of 17 can manage a lot on paper. At 25 or 30, it starts to break down. Digitalising now means sustainable growth later.
FAQs
Why is digitalisation critical for food-grade manufacturers?
Food-grade manufacturing operates under audit regimes that demand complete, accurate, and retrievable records. BRC Global Standard for Food Safety requires documented procedures, traceability records, corrective action logs, and supplier approval documentation — and auditors will ask to see them.
Paper-based systems are vulnerable. Documents get lost, damaged, or completed incorrectly. Retrieving a specific record under audit pressure takes time you don’t have. Digital systems solve this by creating automatic, timestamped records that are searchable and immediately accessible.
Beyond audit readiness, digital records support faster response to customer queries, better visibility of quality trends, and a cleaner handover when key staff are absent. For manufacturers supplying into pharmaceutical or medical supply chains — where traceability is a contractual requirement — digital records are non-negotiable.
How does GoSmarter help businesses with complex compliance requirements?
GoSmarter works with manufacturers to identify the specific compliance documentation that’s creating the most pain, then recommends or configures tools that reduce the manual effort involved.
That might mean a digital quality management module that captures inspection records automatically. It might mean a supplier approval workflow that ensures every new supplier completes the right checks before their first order. Or it might mean connecting existing systems so that compliance data flows without manual re-entry.
For manufacturers with complex regulatory requirements, our compliance solutions are designed to reduce the administration burden without compromising the rigour that auditors expect. The MillCert Reader is one example — it automates the processing of mill certificates, a document-heavy compliance task that typically costs hours of manual effort per week.
What does a digitalisation voucher cover?
Digitalisation vouchers are funded programmes designed to subsidise the cost of digital advisory and technology adoption for small and medium-sized businesses.
In Northern Ireland, Invest NI has historically offered digitalisation voucher schemes covering consultancy costs, software licensing, and implementation support — typically meeting 50% of eligible costs up to a defined cap. Enterprise Ireland runs similar programmes for businesses in the Republic.
These vouchers are designed to reduce the risk of making a first investment in digital tools. They allow businesses to work with a specialist — like GoSmarter — to identify the right tools, implement them correctly, and train the team, without carrying the full cost upfront.
GoSmarter works with clients on funded programmes. We help structure the scope of work to meet funder requirements, manage reporting, and make sure the deliverables are genuinely useful to the business — not just boxes ticked to satisfy the grant conditions.
Go deeper
- GoSmarter Compliance Solutions — managing compliance documentation automatically
- No-Code Workflows for Metals SMEs — how to digitalise without an IT department
- AI for Metals Manufacturing — a plain-English guide to AI in manufacturing
Cut the Scrap
Errors cost money. Scrap costs money. We help you stop making both. Use tools built for the shop floor, not the boardroom.