As millions of Americans sweat their way through a sweltering heat wave, corporate employees, athletes and members of the military are turning to a product McLean resident Justin Li invented to keep cool.
Iceplate, made by Li’s company, Qore Performance, is a hard-cell water bottle that looks more like an oversize ice pack than the Yeti cup or Hydroflask you’re probably toting around. Fill it with drinking water, freeze it overnight and then stick it in a backpack—or in an accessory resembling a Baby Bjorn—so that the pack sits against your chest or back. As the ice melts, drink the water to stay hydrated. When you’re done with it, toss it in the dishwasher.
(And while no one wants to contemplate this thought in mid-July, the Iceplate can also keep you warm come winter, Li says. Just fill it with hot water instead.)
“By providing enough conductive cooling power with hydration, we have managed to prevent heat injuries in 100% of our user base,” says the entrepreneur, who cofounded his company with J.D. Willcox, an engineer and product designer, in 2015. “That’s tens of thousands of people every day.”
Qore has outfitted employees of companies such as Boeing, FedEx, Chick-Fil-A and Shake Shack, to name a few, as well as members of the U.S. military and professional sports teams—basically people who face extreme temperatures in their work.
Li is originally from San Diego, where he worked for the county sheriff’s department, often patrolling large swaths of unincorporated desert. He remembers how the required heavy gear made it difficult to regulate his body temperature and stay hydrated.
One day, he was pursuing an armed suspect in 100-degree heat when he was reminded of a study out of Stanford University he’d read about. “[It] said if you apply high amounts of cooling to the body during and after exercise, you could beat the performance-enhancing effects of anabolic steroids,” he says.
As a first responder, Li was trained in Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC), guidelines for treating life-threatening illnesses like hypothermia and heatstroke. The protocol for heatstroke, he says, is to put ice blocks on pulse points. “When you do that, you’re actually cooling the blood in your body, which is what you have to do to cool the heart, which is what really matters because that’s what cools the organs.”
Soon, he was sitting in his mother’s garage with a pair of his favorite compression shorts and a sewing machine, adding pockets that could hold ice blocks against the inner thigh—the femoral pulse point. That was the start of TCCC Base Layers, a product line designed to keep athletes cool on the field. (Qore Performance also makes arm bands, shorts and shirts that can be outfitted with cooling inserts or hand warmers, depending on the user’s thermoregulation needs.)
In December 2015, Qore Performance launched a Kickstarter campaign to drum up interest in the TCCC Base Layer shirt. That’s when Li was contacted by a group of retired U.S. Army colonels and generals dedicated to connecting with start-ups to solve army problems. They were searching for ways to keep soldiers cool in hot climates without adding weight to their body armor, and specifically needed technology that could generate 147 watts of cooling capacity over two hours.
At first Li was stumped. That is, until a month later, when a friend of his serving on the Navy’s SEAL Team Six mentioned that warfighters in locations such as Iraq and Afghanistan made a habit of freezing their water supplies and jamming the frozen packs under their armor to mitigate the heat.
“I had this lightbulb moment,” Li says. “Every soldier, airman, Marine and sailor is issued a 100-ounce hydration bladder. I called my business partner, J.D., who was a Stanford engineer, and asked how much energy is stored in 100 ounces of water ice.” His answer was 147 watts over about two hours—the Army’s target amount.
“That’s how this product, Iceplate, was born,” Li says.
Today, Qore Performance manufactures various polyethylene thermal products, all of which are BPA-free, for different kinds of users. For instance, Chick-Fil-A outfits drive-thru staff in bright yellow safety vests that contain slots in the front and back for Iceplates.
Most Qore products are available to consumers, with the exception of certain designs that are manufactured specifically for military uses.
Founded in Northern Virginia, the company has grown to 12 employees, manufactures about 100,000 units per year and is now located in Knoxville, Tennessee. Li travels back and forth from his home in McLean.
This month, the planet sustained its hottest week on record. Extreme heat is becoming the norm as climate change alters the earth’s weather patterns. Li is helping companies prepare.
He cites a case study in which the Arizona locations of Dutch Bros. Coffee increased labor capacity by 25% after outfitting outdoor workers with Iceplates. Before that, the company was rotating workers every 15 minutes and still grappling with heat-related injuries and hospitalizations. Now, its staff can stay outside for two hours at a time.
“We are taking temperature and turning it from a constraint,” he says, “to a competitive advantage.” The company’s tagline: #StayFrosty.