Coolers are awesome, since they let you keep food and drinks chilled without the need for a power source. While they’re great for parties to keep all those refreshments cold, they kind of suck for other purposes, since everything is mixed up in the slosh, often leaving the food in there dripping wet. The JOEE wants to change that.
An organizer accessory for coolers, it separates the interior into multiple compartments, giving you a way to keep different items in their own sections. That way, you can have the drinks piled on with the ice water while keeping sandwiches, snacks, and other food items in a dry compartment, allowing you to keep your stash neat and organized when bringing a cooler to a picnic, a tailgate, or a barbecue.
The JOEE is a three-section organizer, giving you a dry compartment, an ice compartment, and a dedicated storage for beverages. Measuring 13.6 x 8.7 x 9.3 inches (width x height x depth), it’s sized to fit most cooler models with a capacity of 30 quarts and up, with any unoccupied space usable as a regular cooler compartment. That means, if you use it with a YETI 35, you can use the organizer to hold some ice, drinks, and food, while putting everything else in the unused cooler space. Suffice to say, it opens up some useful organization options, especially if you like bringing a good amount of food along.
The ice compartment is, basically, a dedicated slot for holding 1.6-pounds’ worth of ice to lower the temperature inside the box without drowning all the other contents in slosh, while the beverage compartment provides a dedicated space for storing either three bottles or six 12-oz cans in an upright position. The latter should make a nice place to separate a few select refreshments, making it ideal for stashing beer if you’re out with the family (so you don’t have to dig through the juices and sodas) or energy drinks if the rest of the cooler is filled with beer.
The JOEE’s dry storage section is what truly makes it special, though, as it gives users a place to store sandwiches, vegetables, and other food items with neither the risk of getting them wet nor the weight of beverages crushing them from the top. A removable lid is designed to cover both the ice and dry sections of the organizer, so it can further lock the cold temperatures down inside. When removed, that same lid, by the way, can be used as a cutting board, which you can use to slice, chop, and dice whatever food items you brought along.
According to the outfit, using the organizer allows the cooler to keep ice even longer, with a test they ran on a hard-sided YETI cooler yielding 13 percent longer ice retention. Other details include impact-resistant plastic construction, a dishwasher-safe design, and a removable divider on the dry compartment.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the JOEE. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $44.