Poundland to offer chilled and frozen food in more stores

Around 350 Poundland stores will have chilled and frozen food on offer.

If you’re looking to save a few quid when stocking the fridge and freezer, then many of us will soon have another retailer to consider besides the mainstream supermarkets.

High street discount store Poundland already stocks frozen and chilled foods in some of its stores, but is ramping this up, with around 100 stores set to begin offering food from September.

As a result, almost half of the Poundland chain ‒ which works out at around 350 stores ‒ will have chilled and frozen food on offer, covering things like ice cream, ready meals, pizzas, chicken and fish.

The first stores to receive these ‘project diamond’ makeovers will begin stocking food within the next couple of weeks, and can be found in areas like Swansea, Devon, Bristol, West Lothian, Suffolk, Portsmouth and Leeds.

More items for £1

Poundland has also confirmed that it is ‘resetting’ its store, so that the items on offer better meet Brits’ stretched budgets.

As a result, it is revamping its range to ensure that around 60% of the items it stocks will be available for £1 or less.

Importantly this includes focusing on the price of individual items, so that shoppers are freed from the “tyranny” (Poundland’s word) of having to buy in bulk in order to save a few quid.

Barry Williams, managing director at Poundland, said that it was clear that people were choosing where to shop more “intentionally”, adding: “While we don’t have a magic trick up our sleeves to counter inflation, we know that those who work hardest to keep costs low will end up winning customers’ trust.”

I think this is incredibly telling. Retailers aren’t daft ‒ they know full well that money is tight, and people are having to make difficult decisions on how and where to spend their cash.

But Williams is right that shoppers’ loyalty can be bought through delivering good value on a consistent basis. Aldi and Lidl aren’t becoming more popular simply because of their prices, but because of the value for money they are providing.

Shoppers feel like they are getting good quality, and at a sensible price, which is why they end up sticking with the deep discounters rather than heading back to the big high street names.

Getting more for our money

The scale of the food price increases has been extraordinary. In the four weeks to mid-May, food price inflation hit a rate of 7%, the highest level registered in 13 years.

That’s bad enough, but the situation is set to get far worse.

Forecasts from the Institute of Grocery Distribution suggest that food price inflation could hit a mammoth 15% this summer, and will then remain at high levels going into next year.

The data pointed to the average monthly spend on groceries for a family of four hitting £439 pound in January next year, compared to £396 in January 2022.

The IGD suggested that price inflation is most likely to be seen on things like meat, cereal products, dairy, fruit and vegetables. Essentially nay products that rely on wheat in some way are likely to see prices spike further.

The spending we can’t cut out

With budgets so stretched, of course people are going through their finances to look to cut out non-essential spending.

The trouble is, while it’s relatively simple to ditch some of that spending ‒ Netflix, magazine subscriptions, etc ‒ there are some expenses which are simply unavoidable, with food chief among them.

Since we can’t simply abandon food shopping, we simply have to be a bit smarter about where we shop, to limit the damage to our bank accounts.

A recent study by Algolia suggested that as many as 19 million shoppers across the UK had switched their primary grocery shopper over the past year, with price the main driver in more than half of cases.

Matching the competition

It’s precisely because of our willingness to try new stores, to attempt to find a better deal that the various supermarkets are falling over themselves to announce new schemes which will mean regular shoppers get a better deal.

That’s why we have had the likes of Tesco and Sainsbury’s announce price match deals with Aldi, where they commit to charge the same amount for specific items as the deep discounter.

That’s why we’ve had Asda relaunch its essentials range, commit to not only dropping prices for certain items but keeping them low, as well as launching a price match scheme of its own with Home Bargains.

Elsewhere, Morrisons has trimmed the price of more than 500 items, in a bid to make a “noticeable and long-term” difference to the finances of its shoppers.

This sort of tactic is only going to become more common in the months ahead, particularly if retailers like Poundland start to play a bigger role in the food market.