Since my last column, frozen food has continued to perform well with value growth seen across almost every category. The latest Kantar Worldpanel statistics value the retail frozen food market as a whole at over GBP5.9bn following impressive value growth of 3% year on year (YOY) and volume growth of 1.2%. By John Hyman, chief executive of British Frozen Food Federation BFFF
While the category that is most in growth is confectionary and ice-cream following heavy investment into NPD and the premium category, hot on its heels is frozen vegetables which boasts a value growth of 4.5% and volume growth of 3.4%. Alongside this, frozen fruit is continuing to deliver impressive results including sales increase of 35.4% in the last twelve months.
Although the frozen fruit and vegetable categories aren’t new to the frozen food market, in recent months they, alongside frozen herbs have seen a boost in popularity due to a number of contributing factors, which doesn’t look likely to slow down any time soon.
Veg shortage
The aptly named #courgettecrisis at the start of the year, which saw consumers faced with a number of ‘product unavailable’ signs in the fresh aisles demonstrated the versatility and availability of frozen produce which remained plentiful in the frozen aisles. This incident demonstrated the reliability of frozen vegetables and drove many shoppers who might not usually purchase frozen into the freezer aisles. As hoped, it seems that many of these new visitors have returned and are likely to stay loyal to frozen, contributing to impressive volume growth of 1.2% this quarter.
The full version of this article is available in the September-October print version of FFE
