Yeti Daytrip lunch bag & soft cooler review — I took it fishing

We all know Yeti for the brand’s signature grizzly-bear-proof coolers, if not the decal stickers adorning nearly every pickup truck from the Redwood Forests to the Gulf Stream waters. Now, they’re making an almost indestructible lunch bag. Though, in all fairness, I don’t think it’d hold up all that well to a grizzly.

Remember those coolers from back in the school days with packing foam for insulation and cheap liners that began de-laminating after the first spill of something sticky? The Daytrip is not that lunch bag.

If you own, or have ever held any of the brand’s soft bags like the Camino, you’ll have an idea of the construction of the Daytrip. To be blunt, even at the cost of sounding trite (and morbid): It’ll outlive you.

Features

This is a lunch bag and there’s nothing truly technical about it. Apart from the magnetic “Thermo Snap” seal, it’s just some very high-quality materials designed and put together smartly. A waterproof outer lining and heavy-duty nylon straps, together with a food-safe inner lining and foam insulation, make this a rugged bag for things both hot and cold.

If you really want to keep it cold, you’ll probably want an ice pack or two. I haven’t used one yet, but the two-pound, quick-freezing Yeti Ice seems to be the favored ice pack of choice among early users and reviewers of the Daytrip, and seeing as how it fits perfectly inside the bag, it makes sense. That said, I just stuck in a couple of small ice packs I’d gotten from a delivery box and they worked just fine.

My field notes

This particular Daytrip saw everything from mud to blood and beer, with not a stain. It didn’t keep things cold for as long as I’d want it to, and in hindsight, I decided cooler packs would have been a good idea. I use them now and it makes all the difference, though you still might not get freezing cold temperatures.

As an experiment to see how cold the Daytrip would get, and stay, I sent a friend home with a couple of pints of ice cream surrounded with cheap ice packs and by the time they got home from a 30-minute subway ride, they were desperately rushing to their freezer to salvage it. But I would hardly call that a flaw; I’ve tried to keep ice cream in many other coolers, including the Yeti Tundra, and I’ve never been able to keep it fully frozen.

Otherwise, without any ice or ice packs, bottled beverages stayed cold for a few hours and still cool for a while after that, which is not bad at all for a little lunch box.

And, as you get on in the day, there are several loops for the little metal buckle so that you can compress it as you remove and consume its contents, which is great for hiking or being on the move. And once it’s empty, at which point it only weighs all of 1.1 pounds, you can stuff it into a backpack or shoulder bag with relative ease and forget about it.

Over the course of five years or so, how many lunch bags would you throw out, either due to separation at the seams, a de-laminated lining, or an insurmountable amount of mold or mildew? You might not want to send your kindergartner (or even your sixth-grader) off to school with it, but if you’re not prone to losing things, and if you take your lunch to work or school (or wherever you regularly go), this bag is a sound investment. If you need a little tote for your beer or soft drinks, it’s also worth the investment. If you ever head to the beach or park with a few snacks, the Daytrip is still probably the best lunch bag for you.

Pros: Sturdy, stain-resistant, magnetic seal, adjustable closure, easy to clean

Cons: Still need some sort of cooling agent to keep things truly cold, perhaps price (but again, how many $20 lunch bags might you buy in a lifetime?)

Buy the Yeti Daytrip from Yeti for $79.99

Buy Yeti Ice ice packs from Yeti for $14.99-$29.99 (depending on size)