I am Rudy, Ruud van Heijst on the paperwork. I did not set out to make ice for a living. My career ran between B2B sales and consumer drinks marketing for major Dutch brands, and somewhere along the way bar menus became field research: order the gin and tonic, study the glass, the garnish, the ice, the price, and whether the whole thing added up.
It started with a thought. Why isn't there a recognisable brand of ice? So much money is spent to get positive hospitality experiences, while from the business side millions are spent in new liquor development, hospitality interior development, and the rest of the food and beverage scene, yet somehow ice is still just plain ice. And it has limitations. Many times during travels I wondered if a drink was safe because of potential bacteria in the water that made the ice, in areas where tap water isn't potable. Sometimes it's cloudy as hell and doesn't do justice to the presentation of a 20-euro gin and tonic. Sometimes it melted 5 minutes in the drink.
Ice was rarely the only weak point. But it was the detail that made expensive pours look careless: venues paying for top-shelf spirits and trained staff, then serving over hazy cubes that melted fast, cracked on the pour, and left the last sip tasting flat. When ice came up at all, the reasons for leaving it alone were usually some mix of the same things: the cubes are fine once you look past the cloudiness, carving clear ice takes time nobody has on a busy shift, good ice costs more, and guests probably will not notice anyway.
Guests do notice. They just don't file complaints about dilution curves. They finish faster, skip the second round, or photograph the one bar on the block where the whole serve, ice included, looked intentional. That gap between what staff say and what guests do is a big part of why we ended up building Aurasphere.
The mould-kit phase
The first attempt was the same as everyone's: sphere moulds ordered online. They produced cloudy, ugly ice that cracked unevenly and would embarrass you in front of a guest. On top of that, placing our first halo ring prototypes was just impossible. They would float all over the place or melt before the ice was formed. It made clear to us that we couldn't short-cut our way to create the ice I envisioned.
I remember early freezer experiments where the blocks cracked and split overnight, soaking the kitchen, because I had not yet learned what directional freezing was. More than once I nearly gave the whole idea up.
The idea that would not let go
When I started researching this, I found there were far more clear-ice producers around the world than I had imagined, and a lot of genuinely good work. But they were nearly all chasing the same things: clarity and a range of sizes. My vision was about the inside of the ice, much less about the clarity itself. Ice fills half the glass, yet almost nobody designs what happens within it. Some artisans freeze a flower into a block and carve a cube around it: beautiful, one-off work. The makers who do add a signature usually stamp a logo onto the outside, where it melts away in the first minutes.
The idea: freeze the signature into the ice itself. A jewellery ring, made of ice (sometimes with 23-karat gold suspended inside), held at the centre of a clear, slow-melting shape. It took a lot of trial and error to move from that idea to something we could execute repeatably.
Getting it right
Hundreds of failed spheres: cracked shells, cloudy cores, rings drifting off-centre, halos that looked accidental instead of intentional. We logged freeze direction, hold times, tempering behaviour, how the ring read under bar lighting versus daylight. What finally worked was treating clarity, geometry and the centred ring as three separate problems, each with its own stage of control.
We do this from Breda for a simple reason: it is home. It is a city that lives for social gatherings, with a hospitality scene to match, and yet not one bar here has made the ice a focal point. Starting where we live, somewhere that loves going out, felt like the right place to prove it.
Trade only, one country at a time
We are trade only, by design: bars, hotels, restaurants, and events, one country at a time. No supermarket freezers, no mass wholesale. We would rather get it right for bartenders.
First tastings start from September 2026, with first deliveries targeted for autumn 2026: the Netherlands and Belgium first, then surrounding markets, one country at a time, earned bar by bar.
“We became obsessed with one thing: creating the first recognisable ice in the world, ice that earns its place in the glass. We are proud that, so far, it looks like we have managed exactly that.”