- Soft coolers are great for keeping your food and drinks cold when you're hiking, camping, fishing, or picnicking.
- While it may be overkill for some, the Yeti Hopper M30 is the best all-around soft cooler with its signature HYDROLOK zipper, big capacity, and rugged build quality.
To the fisherman, a reliable cooler makes the difference between bringing home fresh fillets or wasting the catch as it spoils in the heat. At the tailgate party or picnic, a good cooler means cold beer and soda instead of warm swill. For the campers, a cooler keeps food chilled and safe for days on end even when the nearest refrigerator is a three-day hike back out of the woods. And so forth.
The cooler you chose will largely be determined by how often you use it and what you use it for the most. If, for all intents and purposes, you're just transporting your lunch to the office or bringing some snacks and drinks to the soccer field for an afternoon, there's really no need spring for a Yeti or other high-end coolers. However, fishermen, frequent campers, and hikers will probably want to invest in a long-lasting soft cooler like a Yeti.
If you're buying a cooler for camping or you're dabbling in van life, you're probably going to want a cooler with some quality closed-cell insulation for keeping your groceries fresh. You'll also want a smaller, auxiliary cooler for things you reach for often so that you're opening your main cooler as infrequently as possible.
Open-cell insulation is basically polyurethane packaging foam. It's lightweight, airy, and the air bubbles that form the insulation are loosely arranged, which isn't terribly effective.
Closed-cell insulation is a heavier, pricier material with tidier, more individual air bubbles that insulate far better. This is partly what makes coolers in the Yeti and Rtic tiers so much more expensive. Of course, we can't deny that you're paying for the name, too.
We've spent at least two-dozen hours researching the best soft coolers on the market, and ended up testing more than 10, but we've rounded up our favorites.
Here are our top picks for the best soft coolers you can buy:
- Best soft cooler overall: Yeti Hopper M30
- Best soft cooler for ice packs: Polar Bear H2O
- Best soft cooler for capacity: IceMule Pro
- Best budget-friendly cooler: AO Canvas Cooler
Updated 10/29/2019 by Owen Burke: Updated prices, links, and formatting. Replaced the older Yeti Hopper Two with the new zipperless (magnetic) Yeti Hopper M30. We're currently testing HydroFlask's Insulated Totes for a food-specific cooler bag.
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