Post #758967 by AceExplorer on Thu, Feb 11, 2016 3:56 AM

Couple things come to mind:

1. Gas stations (and grocery stores) generally don't make ice, they buy it already bagged from a supplier and store it in their storage freezers. Storage freezers by themselves don't have the ability to get mold and crap into your bags unless the bags are compromised and the interior surfaces are filthy. Most gas stations and grocers have their ice bags delivered and stacked by the supplier, and it's easy to get "clean" and unadulterated bags from the stack.

2. Gas station ice which has large chunks of solidified ice tells me that it's "old" ice which has aged and which may have experienced some thawing and re-freezing due to power failures or maintenance cycles, or has just been sitting in the freezer for a very long period and become compressed and thereby has been allowed to freeze more solid. From personal experience: My city has one of the largest NFL stadiums in the country, and at the first game of every year, the bagged ice in the freezers has achieved 30% to 50% solid form from sitting unused too long. I avoid working those games because of the huge hassle it is to be forced to ice my taps and tubs with old ice which must be broken up by dropping on the concrete 5 or 6 times per bag. That really sucks because you can't ice the tap coils or bottles very well with chunky ice.

3. Ice makers which freeze water in cube sheets and then break it up mechanically or with heating wires DO need to be cleaned periodically and sanitized. There are a number of YouTube videos demonstrating this, it's quite a pain and must be done by the service techs. Your home fridge icemaker doesn't need this because it makes individual cubes, and moisture and other material doesn't have the same surfaces to build up on and get moldy in the same way that larger volume commercial machines do. So the periodic cleaning applies to ice plants which supply the gas stations, and to places like Sonic which have their own high-volume ice machines, and also to the corner stand-alone unattended big ice making vending machines which Mike described. (I've never had a problem at these places either, and love filling my ice chests there for parties and other special events.)

4. I also serve alcoholic beverages at my local sports arena where we have only onsite machine-made ice, and I have spent a lot of time looking at the ice in my bins. You would be surprised how clean it is and how little (if any) crud actually shows up in the HUGE volumes of ice we use. They DO clean their machines regularly, but still, if anything does make its way into the ice, its often a tiny speck at the worst. My impression is that we have more problems and risk with all the insect parts which are a "normal" FDA-allowed part of our every-day food supply which get ground into our flour and pancake mixes and cereals and other stuff. I'm NOT saying its good or ok, but that a certain amount of crud is impossible to keep out of our food supply. As far as the TV shows go -- they often show the worst of the worst, it's all about entertainment and sensationalism for them, so I try to keep that in mind when I watch Bar Rescue and stuff like it.

I did decide to buy a KitchenAid 50lb capacity ice maker for my bar and it rocks both for convenience and for time savings. (I paid half price, it supposedly has a scratch or dent, but I've never been able to find it.) I don't run it continuously, which is both good and bad, but I watch my ice like a hawk and don't have any problems. The machine is FAST and saves me the hassle of buying ice. I love it.