The American Frozen Food Institute (AFFI) and the Frozen Food Roundtable, an alliance of major frozen food suppliers including ConAgra, General Mills, H.J. Heinz, Kellogg Co. and Nestlé USA, along with retail giant Wal-Mart are teaming up launch an ad campaign budgeted at $50 million.
McCann Erickson is the ad agency handling the campaign, whose goal is to warm consumers to the frozen-food aisle. The frozen-food players began early this year to build the skeleton of a multi-million-dollar campaign to target baby-boomer, millennial and Hispanic shoppers, in face of research indicating that 98% of products in the frozen aisle are experiencing flat or declining sales in the US, across nearly all categories.
Driving these declines are more health-conscious consumers and their association of frozen foods with high sodium, sugar, fat, calories and preservatives. "You know you have a health-perception problem when a fast-food marketer takes a shot at you," Ad Age noted. "So when Wendy's -- hardly the standard for health food -- makes a point of marketing its beef as 'fresh, never frozen,' the $70 billion frozen-food industry decided it had to do something."
In a prospectus dated Feb. 15, the groups behind the effort said they were seeking "proposals for the development of a consumer-facing campaign designed to change the way consumers think and feel about frozen food by promoting positive messaging regarding the benefits and attributes of frozen foods." Individual frozen-food producers have taken on the cause. ConAgra, for example, launched a campaign for its Healthy Choice and Marie Callender's brands to help consumers "better understand the benefits of frozen meals and experience frozen foods in a new way."
The group's industry-conducted research beginning late last year had found that although the perception of frozen vegetables surpassed those of other frozen subcategories, frozen-food penetration rates are down across all age groups, with the highest losses among 35-to-44-year-olds. There are "significant concerns with the nutritional value and a general feeling that frozen foods are not as good as fresh," according to the findings. These concerns were often linked to the frozen-entree category. Moreover, the longevity and convenience of frozen foods were once selling points, but they are no longer changing a general apathy toward the category.
