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Diving overview:
- According to a report released this week by the American Frozen Food Institute and the Food Industry Institute (FMI), in the 52 weeks ending in September 2025, frozen food sales in the U.S. increased more than 45% compared to 2019, reaching $87 billion. Sales growth reflects both inflation and volume growth.
- Sales of frozen processed meat and poultry more than doubled to $8 billion, while frozen snack sales increased nearly 70% to $4.4 billion.
- Shoppers are increasingly combining frozen and fresh ingredients in the same meal, with more than three-quarters of respondents saying they do so.
Dive Insights:
The rapid increase in frozen food consumption in recent years is partly due to difficult economic times facing many shoppers, which has led to greater interest in cost-saving measures such as home cooking, meal planning and preventing food waste, according to the Power of Frozen in Retail report.
The study involved 1,560 participants, all of whom eat frozen meals several times a year, and was conducted in October 2025 by 210 Analytics using sales overlays provided by Circana.
Nearly a third of respondents said they intend to buy more frozen food over the next year. About 40% of study participants said they were “very interested” in using frozen meals made from “real” ingredients that were minimally processed, high in protein, and free of artificial ingredients. The number of respondents who responded that the quality of frozen food is better than fresh food increased by 3 percentage points to 15%.
Supermarkets in particular have lost share of the frozen food sector to clubs and mass retailers, who now account for the same share of frozen food spending as traditional grocers. Large retailers saw their frozen food sales increase by more than a quarter in the year ending September 2025 compared to 2019, while club retailers recorded an increase of almost 14%. Meanwhile, frozen food sales at traditional grocery stores fell nearly 40% during the same period.
Nearly 90% of online shoppers said they had used digital channels to order frozen meals in the past six months. This is an increase from 86% in 2023 and 82% in 2020, with deliveries increasing and pickups decreasing.
The report recommends that retailers help increase shopper interest in purchasing frozen foods by focusing on signage, layout, and themed merchandise as a way to drive sales. According to the study, retailers should also take steps to link frozen and fresh foods, such as using co-location or dual-temperature displays, and use visual elements to reinforce attributes such as “flash-frozen freshness” and “farm-to-freezer.”
The trade group also suggested in its report that consistency is an area where retailers can improve how they manage frozen departments. More than a quarter of study participants said the availability of products they wanted to buy was “very inconsistent,” and nearly a fifth said they often had trouble finding the products they wanted.
