When a lettuce recall recently hit the news, shoppers didn’t completely stop buying vegetables. They walked a few aisles over to the freezer section. That small change in behavior has been playing out for the past few months, and it’s part of a bigger shift in how people are buying frozen food right now.
Why Frozen Is Outpacing the Rest of the Grocery Store
While grocery shoppers have been holding the line on how much they put in their carts, frozen has been one of the few departments still growing. The National Frozen & Refrigerated Foods Association’s latest performance review found frozen posted dollar gains every week in September and unit growth in three of the four, even as overall food and beverage units stayed flat. Frozen fruits and vegetables were among the growth standouts, with dollar sales up more than 6% while fresh produce struggled through recall related losses. Shoppers aren’t just grabbing frozen dinners anymore. They’re stocking frozen ingredients and cooking with them right alongside fresh.
Here’s why that matters for any company moving frozen products. Ingredient driven growth doesn’t come from one specific item. It spreads across a multitude of commodities, brands, and pack sizes, and shows up as frequent replenishment instead of a few big promotional waves. The challenge isn’t only how many pallets you can hold. It’s how many SKUs you’re managing, how quickly they turn, and how reliably each one ships at the correct temperature.
What Frozen Food Growth Means for Cold Storage Warehousing
That puts a different kind of pressure on the warehouse. A frozen line with a dozen SKUs behaves very differently from one with three. Every new item means another lot to track and another slot to manage. Accurate inventory and disciplined lot control stop being back office details and start showing up in your fill rates. That’s where a BRCGS-certified cold storage operation earns its value: the same processes that protect food safety also keep a growing SKU list organized.
It also puts pressure on transportation. Smaller, more frequent replenishment orders tend to push frozen shippers toward ltl shipping and consolidated loads rather than full truckloads. That shift is happening while refrigerated capacity is already tight, with DAT reporting reefer truck availability down 18.7% from a year earlier heading into the fall. RLS is built for exactly this kind of order profile. Our transportation teams have access to a vast and vetted carrier network when your usual lanes come up short.
Then there’s the shopper who never walks into a grocery store at all. As more frozen brands sell directly to consumers, the same inventory sitting in cold storage must support pallet shipments to a distribution center and individual orders headed to a customer’s home. This channel gets especially demanding around the holidays. Running both from one network, instead of splitting inventory between separate partners, keeps those channels from working against each other.
Building a Cold Chain for Today’s Food Shopper
The good news for frozen brands is that this demand is real, and it’s sticking. The question worth asking now is whether your cold chain is set up for the way people buy frozen today. RLS has supported frozen and refrigerated food companies for decades, with cold storage, transportation, and fulfillment working together under one roof. If your frozen business model is changing shape, contact our team of Cold Chain Experts to talk through what your network needs next.
ABOUT RLS LOGISTICS: Headquartered in Glassboro, NJ, RLS Logistics is a family-owned, third-party logistics provider specializing in value-added cold chain solutions, including LTL and FTL transportation, cold storage warehousing, and direct-to-consumer fulfillment. Founded in 1968, the company has been owned and managed by the Leo family for over 55 years and has grown into a leading integrated cold chain 3PL. For more information, visit https://www.rlslogistics.com/. Interested in joining one of the region’s leading temperature controlled logistics providers offering transportation, 3PL warehousing, packaging, and distribution services? Visit https://rlslogistics.com/logistics-careers.
