That future is now. And it is jelly—jelly ice, to be more specific.
It’s a squishy, reusable, and compostable hydrogel created by researchers at UC Davis that may revolutionize the world of cold storage, right down to the meats and fish you pick up at the grocery store.
Unveiled at the American Chemical Society’s Fall 2025 meeting, jelly ice is made of 90 percent water and behaves like gelatin. It freezes and it thaws, but it never becomes a watery mess.
While melted ice mixes with its surroundings to become a liquid transportation medium for bacteria and disease, jelly ice can be sanitized and reused.
Scientists Made “Jelly Ice,” and It Doesn’t Melt Like Regular Ice
The origin story starts, fittingly, in a grocery store. Concerned about the hygiene disaster that is melted ice used to pack, chill, and display seafood, the UC Davis team started thinking about frozen tofu.
If you’ve never held a brick of uncooked tofu before, you may not be familiar with its odd gelatinous spongelike structure. It’s like Jell-O, but more delicate, so delicate that it’s a wonder it even holds its shape. It can hold water when it’s frozen and can relinquish it when it’s thawed.
So, they wondered, what if ice were more like tofu?
After years of failed experiments, the researchers developed a process to create jelly ice that retains its water throughout every freeze-thaw cycle. And while it’s not quite as efficient as regular ice (about 80 percent as good at absorbing heat), its reusability more than makes up for that.
Jiahan Zou, the postdoc who helped lead the research, says jelly ice still needs to pass the corporate litmus tests of product design and large-scale production. Some other nifty features of jelly ice include the ability to create jelly ice in various shapes, from standard ice cubes to honeycomb patterns and decorative flowers. It’s just a liquid that stiffens into the shape of the container it’s being exported to, so the limit is your imagination.
Since jelly ice isn’t made with plastics, it’s compostable. When you’re done with it, feel free to chop it up and throw it in your compost pile or directly into a plant pot.
For years, ice was hard. Now, thanks to some brilliant yet elegant and straightforward science, ice will be squishy.
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