Espresso - David Milner - Why Frozen Food Has A Horrible Reputation in the UK?

0:01I want to talk about Frozen as a category in itself. favorite category yeah talk to me about that because i think i was in costa rica with this i think frozen in the uk gets a bad rep because of iceland whereas i think and obviously we can take that out if you'd like but like um whereas i think in i met these this couple have got their own frozen store in costa rica sorry in canada they've met them in costa rica right and they're like frozen is just a thing over there yeah it is like if you get frozen vegetables it's cheaper and healthier for you. Like, how do brands win in frozen? It's something I've never really talked about before and I think it's fascinating.

0:38Because you're in Costa Rica, you're in frozen. So pizzas, we are 50 % of our business is in frozen. I mean, we've got a really big frozen pizza business. Yeah. Well, if you travel, and you do, you're just meeting these people in Costa Rica, but if you travel, you realise that the environment we have in the UK where if you want to buy really high quality food, you have to go to the chiller cabinet. But if you go to the freezer area, it tends not to be quite so upmarket. That's the situation we have in the UK. That's not the case elsewhere in the world. We are the anomaly. So if you go to America, for example, as I did, as I frequently do, and go look at the pizza category, it's 100 % frozen.

1:15There isn't a chilled category. If you go to France, there's no chilled pizza in France. It's all frozen. You go to Scandinavia, it's all frozen. It's only here that we have this chilled category and this obsession that chilled, which people think is fresh which isn't necessarily um is somehow better than frozen food but as you rightly say frozen food can be equally or better quality than chilled food so i used to be in the fish industry if you catch the fish and freeze it on board the boat within three hours of being caught that fish is probably higher quality than anything you buy that's been chilled all the way through the supply chain yeah but try and convince someone of that very hard yeah i've always thought there should be like somewhere in between a planet organic and basically a planet organic version of Iceland, where you go in, everything's frozen, but it's high quality.

2:03Well, there is in France. So Picard in France is the retailer that is a master's expenses quality, and it's all frozen. Yes. And you can buy fillet steak, giant prawns, beautiful cod frozen at sea. It's superb quality food. The problem is here that we've got a perception of frozen food as being somewhat cheap and nasty, because most of the brands historically have sold to that end of the market through frozen. But you can sell, there are some things now. So Costa Malica is a good example of the only pizza in frozen that's doing really well is us, and that's premium. Itzu is a great example of premium bao buns and gyozos that Julian Metcalfe's launched into a supermarket in frozen, hugely successful.

2:46So there are some, and ice cream, some of the ice creams are very premium. It's an extremely premium product and does brilliantly. So frozen, you can have fabulous things in frozen. And I think it will change because the other benefits of frozen are no preservatives required because the preservative is the freezing. You need less ingredients because it's so it can be less ultra processed. There's much less food waste. Chilled food. If you buy a giant prawn in the UK in chilled, which you think is fresh, all it is is defrosted. It's got about five days till it goes off. That very prawn was frozen before they sent it into the supermarket.

3:23If you bought them frozen, you take them out of your freezer and have them just when you want them. And then the rest go back in the freezer until the next month that you want some. So there's no waste in the supermarket. There's no waste at home. So there's all sorts of reasons why frozen is a better supply chain. Do you think the system and the way, because I swear no one even goes down that aisle in the UK. A lot of people wouldn't go down there. Yeah. Just to buy ice cream, maybe. Yeah. And how do you think it begins? Is it like brands that lead the change? I think it has to be brands. You have to have the offering.

3:53You can have signs saying, come down our frozen island. It's great. But unless when you get down there, you find the kind of things that you want to buy. Brands that you can relate to, products of the quality that you want to buy. Unless they're there, it's not going to work. But I think there's early signs that it's happening. We're part of that across the Malika. And I think once people get down there and they realize they can buy really high quality products in frozen, and I think it can do well, like the rest of the world. Have you done different brands in each? I think Perry was saying that to me.

4:21Sorry, as in, sorry, different packaging for Frozen versus... We have, actually. We've just... The new packaging design, which is in store now, just going in, we've done a slightly different design in Frozen for chilled because in chilled, they tend to be well-lit and very visible. In Frozen, you often have a glass door or some misting or it's in a well. So we've used a brighter packaging design so that when you in frozen it stands out more yes because it needs to which is you know it's perry that was very smart two months free yeah that's what espresso sponsors unleashed are offering they are supply chain gurus and offer inventory management that talks to your e-com and accounting software it's helped islands cut admin time in half get granular clarity on your margins know where your stock is don't miss availability brands like candy kittens tarquin's gin minor figures and trip all use unleashed and i reckon you should too as i said two months free in the show notes click there and you're gonna get two months for free