Name: Why Americans Love Frozen Food
Uploaded: 2024-08-08T05:26:47.000Z
Duration: 13 min 8 s
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In 2022, frozen food sales in the U.S. reached over $72 billion.

Adverbs of manner

Throughout COVID, we had among the highest sales in all of the food space.

Behind this seemingly simple idea, there's a sophisticated supply chain keeping perishables frozen.

The products have to maintain proper temperature throughout a complex network of refrigerated trucks and cold storage facilities.

Should the temperature vary, it can become unsafe.

But it's not just about keeping ice cream from melting.

The percentages are remarkable in terms of what's tossed frozen items because of inadequate cold storage temperature.

And the refrigeration tech is often outdated.

We're still relying on centuries old technology.

The weak link in cold chain logistics, planes, trains, automobiles, is how to deliver any perishable good at the appropriate temperature.

Major players in the global frozen food market include privately held Cargill, ConAgra, Nestle, General Mills and Unilever.

So the consumers are buying more frozen product.

It's going to require more storage capability and a more efficient supply chain.

And so are those investing in really cold properties.

Supply chain issues and labor challenges haven't really gone away in the food industry.

Without resilient supply chain infrastructure, the growth and safety of the massive $265 billion global frozen food market is at risk.

Can cold storage supply chains keep up with frozen food demand?

Virtually all American households purchase frozen food at least once a year.

Since 2019, sales have grown by 23 percent, according to the American Frozen Food Institute.

When COVID happened, when supply chain everything got shut down, you saw a huge spike in frozen food, sometimes 30, 40, 50 percent year over year basis.

Frozen food's demand was supercharged during the pandemic in the U.S., bringing in over $65 billion in 2020.

The pandemic taught consumers to invest in bulk buying.

Frozen foods were some of the best selling items during the pandemic since they can be really stored for long periods of time.

We saw about a 20 percent growth during COVID, which was really very rapid and fast.

Most frozen food products reported double digit increases.

We did a recent survey and found that over 80 percent of consumers look to frozen to reduce in-home food waste and also save money.

One great study by Cornell that looked into how much waste the average consumer has between both fresh and frozen and what they found was with frozen food, you're five times more likely not to encounter food waste.

Every year, roughly $1,300 is spent by the average American on food that ends up as waste.

You know, Cargill produces enough protein to feed 170 million people around the world.

So that's enough to feed the entire country of Bangladesh every single day.

The frozen category, really seeing things like variety meats more likely to be purchased frozen.

At the end of the day, it's about that 4 p.m. dinner tonight decision, right?

The dinner is packed and ready for Sub-Zero storage.

Industry has come a long way since the 1930s when Clarence Birdseye pioneered a flash freezing technique that better preserved foods.

Before then, the market was known for tasteless and textureless products.

Quick freezing is one of the newer ways of keeping foods, meat, fruit, vegetables.

I'm sorry, but I already have a frozen food man.

And the 1950s and 60s became the golden age of food freezing.

Birdseye, Hawaiian-style international vegetable.

That flash freezing technique is still how a lot of frozen products are made today, particularly with mechanical freezing.

Think frozen plates and conveyor belts for contact freezing or the air blast method, which is one of the oldest and commonly used.

That's when cold air fills a room of food to freeze it.

Freezing technology really hasn't gained leaps and bounds.

And what that means is let's say strawberries are coming out of a field in California.

We'll take those warm strawberries out of the field as soon as they're cleaned, and then we'll blast them down to negative 20 degrees and then store them so then later they can be consumed.

The air blasting technique also utilizes individual quick freezing, a.k.a.

An IQF, what it does is it frees individual pieces of food and that does two things.

One, the speed of the freezing helps reduce the size of the ice crystal.

So it helps preserve the integrity of the food when it's thawed or frozen.

It helps freeze at that peak of freshness, and that's really an aspect that whether you look at meat or vegetables, a lot of industries have really focused on communicating that message as well.

The other way food can be frozen is cryogenic freezing.

It uses liquid nitrogen or carbon dioxide to get to extremely low temperatures quickly.

But it can be more expensive for companies to invest and switch to the cryogenic techniques, plus the cost of nitrogen added to that.

However, cryogenic freezing is much faster since that liquid nitrogen is so cold.

One estimate puts mechanical freezing at nearly an hour to freeze fruits and veggies, while cryogenic freezing could take 11 minutes.

The faster food can freeze, the smaller ice crystals that form, which ultimately creates a higher quality product.

Our data scientists heard that we were not blasting strawberries fast enough in California.

The algorithm, based on computational fluid dynamics, that we're able to reduce the freeze cycle from three days down to one to two days.

So not only are you reducing the lead time of freezing the berries, but we're using less energy to do that.

How to freeze food is just the first half of the equation.

Frozen foods need a robust and sustainable cold storage supply chain to reach consumers.

Even Birdseye recognized this in the late 1920s when convincing Americans to try frosted foods.

He created his own refrigerated boxcars for trains and leased freezers out to retailers.

The U.S. still transports a lot of food by truck.

In the U.S. we're very fortunate, but in other developing countries we're seeing an investment in the cold chain to try and keep the agricultural products preserved for year-round consumption.

It's really a way of preventing food waste globally.

Approximately 13 percent of all food produced globally is lost due to poor cold storage every year.

That wasted food could have fed an estimated 950 million people. 10th annual disruptor 50 list are fastest growing private companies challenging public incumbents.

Number three, Lineage Logistics, improving the food supply chain to prevent waste with a proprietary freezing process.

Lineage serves big name customers, including Walmart and McDonald's.

Lineage Logistics focuses on the frozen food market, and part of its mission is decreasing global food waste.

And so we provide frozen and chilled warehousing, 450 warehouses across 20 countries.

Salmon will be harvested up in the Pacific Northwest.

Salmon will immediately be packaged, put into one of our freezers.

That packaged salmon across the country may go to a retail store and then finally to the consumers at home.

It may end up moving to a restaurant where the final consumer then purchases.

But we're helping to move that food through the entire cold chain and ensuring that it keeps a safe temperature the entire way.

The supply chain weaknesses garnered international attention when the coronavirus pandemic struck.

COVID really showed how fragile the supply chain system is.

That really exposed huge gaps in being able to transport in frozen food and even refrigerated food in the U.S.

At the same time, it's expensive to generate power to keep the entire supply chain frozen.

Being able to minimize costs in different ways, whether you're using different software, AI, robotics, freezing technology, driverless technology to transport the product from point A to point B, like that is the biggest pain point.

Our data scientists have looked at the space that's used in our freezers because they consume a lot of energy.

And we want to make sure that we're using every square inch of that facility with frozen food.

They've created algorithms to be able to see where are we not using some of that cubic space and how can we optimize that usage.

The G have been able to create over 300,000 additional pallet positions of frozen food that is equivalent to a three million square foot freezer.

Food waste also contributes to unnecessary emissions.