Alan Soelter wasn’t a happy camper.

He said it seemed like every time he and his family would plan a camping trip during a holiday weekend in the Lawrence area, they spent most of their time trying to find ice.

Susan and Alan Soelter bag ice at their Lawrence business, River City Ice Co. The company, which opened in March, has been preparing for the Fourth of July holiday. The company can produce 10 tons of ice, or 2,500 8-pound bags of ice, per day.

So Soelter and his wife, Susan, opened an ice plant.

Their business, River City Ice Co., has been cranking out ice since March.

This week the couple faces its first Fourth of July holiday, which they are expecting to be their biggest moneymaker of the year.

Their plant, which can produce 10 tons of ice per day, is the first in Lawrence since 1987, when Lawrence-based Banning Sales and Service got out of the ice business.

Soelter declined to say how many clients the company has lined up, but said it was adding new customers such as convenience stores, liquor stores and grocery stores each week. Previously, Lawrence retailers either had to make their own ice or buy it from producers in Kansas City or Topeka. Soelter said that’s why he and his wife decided to open the business at 4910 Wakarusa Court.

“Lawrence is a community that is growing, and it just seemed odd to us that it has to depend on Topeka and Kansas City for its ice supply,” Soelter said.

River City Ice also does business in towns within a 50-mile radius of Lawrence, but Soelter said the company’s first plan is to expand its Lawrence customer base.

“We feel like one of our better selling points is that if a local convenience store has somebody come in and buy 25 bags of ice and wipe out its supply, we feel like we should be able to get ice to that business a lot quicker than our out-of-town competitors.”

Lawrence should be a good market for ice, Soelter said. Between boaters and campers who use Clinton Lake and the student population at Kansas University, the community likely uses more ice than an average town its size, he said.

“Having been a college kid in Lawrence, I know how much ice they can suck up,” said Soelter, who previously worked in Lawrence as a civil engineer. “We’re counting on some of that business.”

Bruce Banning, who owned Lawrence’s last commercial icehouse, said he thought the Lawrence market might be ready for its own ice business again he still gets calls from people wanting to buy ice.

But he sounded a caution.

“It is an expensive business to get into, and it can be a tough business,” said Banning, whose company still sells ice-making and restaurant equipment. “We got out of it because for a company our size there wasn’t a lot of profit but there were a lot of long hours.”

Soelter declined to say how much the company invested in its equipment but said it installed systems that also would allow the company to expand into the bottled water business something it may begin producing by this fall.

In addition, he said, the company is exploring custom labeling of bottled water. For example, if the city’s high schools became customers, they could have bottled water with their mascots printed on the label.