Young's drives a switch to frozen seafood

This issue was highlighted this month by Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who called for prudent eating in light of a study issued by the Cabinet Office which showed that families in the UK are throwing away 4.1 million tonnes of perfectly good food every year, costing each around £420 annually. According to Young’s, recent market data shows that frozen seafood is benefiting from consumers’ reassessment of frozen food, and that people increasingly switch from chilled to frozen. Now worth £753m, frozen seafood is the biggest and most buoyant sector of the whole frozen category – currently growing at 5 per cent. In the last year, Young’s frozen fish, currently worth £176m, stormed to a 15 per cent year on year increase with particularly strong sales in prawns, scampi and fish fingers. For the first time in recent memory the figures show that frozen fish has outpaced that of chilled. Jim Cane, managing director of Young’s claimed it was also a better way to manage the supply chain from distant parts of the world: “Shipping frozen foods will become even important in the future as air-freight becomes less acceptable because of its environmental impact,” he said.