This post was sponsored by Swiss Premium™ Tea part of a campaign through Activate.
Enjoying hot Summer days can be difficult if you are away from home and need to pack your cooler. We have found some tips over the years to help you keep your food cool while enjoying a Summer day away from home.
Give some of these tips a try and see if it help make packing your cooler a success!
Pick The Correct Size Cooler
We now own multiple sizes of both soft sided coolers and hard coolers. We have specific ideas of what we use each one for. Smaller lunch bags are great if we plan to eat our lunch on the way to park or museum. Medium soft sided coolers work great to pack snacks that you don’t want to get hot or melt like granola bars. Larger soft sided coolers work for an entire meal and snacks for our family of 6. If we will be walking around a lot lie at the zoo then we pack our cooler on wheels.
Our small cooler is often used when enjoying a day playing outside or for backyard camping. Our larger cooler on wheels is what we take camping or to family reunions or day at State Park if we are there for 2 meals and snacks. So far this summer we’ve used our large soft sided cooler most often when heading to the beach or park.
Keep Your Cooler Cool
We freeze juice pouches to keep our cooler cool and have cool drinks for the kids. As they thaw out and the kids drink them we can throw the pouches away making our cooler lighter as we go throughout the day. In really hot weather we may freeze 3/4 filled bottles of water as well just to be sure that we have enough cold drinks to last us all day!
Pack Heavy Items in the Bottom of Cooler
We have found that putting heavy items in the bottom like water bottles and frozen juice pouches keep lighter items from getting squished.We usually put sandwiches in hard cases but have recently thrown some out after the sandwich cases were found months later not cleaned out! Can you say gross Science experiment?! We may resort to a larger container that holds multiple sandwiches that can be reused and is clear so that we know if it’s clean or not. I will also be keeping an eye out for more individual sandwich holders at garage sales this year.
Pack Plenty of Drinks
Wherever we go whether it be the beach, park or longer day trip, packing drinks is a must, and there’s nothing that gets requested more than iced tea. We usually make our own when we’re at home, but it’s not always the most portable. For the perfect combination of convenience and great taste we occasionally like to grab a jug of sweet tea to go. We found Swiss Premium Tea in the cold case section of Walmart.
The only variety at our local Walmart store was Southern Style which suits our family just fine! I love that it contains all-natural ingredients of Swiss products, starting with just water, sugar and tea; no high-fructose corn syrup or preservatives. You can save money on your own jug of Swiss Premium Tea with this coupon! If you really enjoy the Summer and want to share it with Swiss Premium Tea then enter the Tea It Up sweepstakes.
Sweet Tea is all I drink pretty much so we even purchase it for the house since I am the only one who drinks tea unless we are out and about and a Gallon will last me almost 2 weeks. This is the brand David picks up the most for me on his way home and if we are heading to the Park or Swimming into the cooler it goes. As for freezing Juice Boxes I never thought of that but will try it the next time we are going out.