Frozen Snacks Market Research Report - Forecast till 2030

Impact of Covid-19 Outbreak on Frozen Snacks Market

The advent of the global pandemic, COVID-19 has resulted in creating a global crisis across the world. Impacting over 215 countries, the pandemic has already created economic backdrop worldwide. With over 4.1 million COVID-19 cases worldwide along with 2,83,876 fatalities during the second week of May 2020, the global pandemic, COVID-19 is deemed to create a chaotic environment thereby resulting in the advent of global rescission. This pandemic situation has been affecting the commodity market in many ways. The demand for essential commodities such as groceries has been increasing in multiples.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has created a panic situation among the consumers with temporary closures of retail stores in an attempt to slow the spread of virus. This has led to an increased sale of convenience food such as frozen snacks as the consumers are involving in pantry stockpiling of shelf-stable foods. Stockpiling practice has led to sudden hike in the market value of the global frozen snacks market in 2020 which will normalize with stable situation in the country from the outbreak. According to the US Soyabean Export Council, frozen food sector has been seeing an upward trend owing to the increasing demand for convenience food. Frozen snacks includes products such as vegetables and fruits, meat, poultry, and seafood, bakery products, meat substitutes, frozen desserts and confectionery. The manufactures of these products are hiring to keep up the demand for the products as consumers are stockpiling comfort foods to get them through the pandemic. For instance, according to American Bakers Association (ABA), the North American bakery industry is scaling up the workforce to answer the demand for frozen bakery products.

In response to coronavirus pandemic, consumers are put under lockdown with several states imposing stay-at-home orders. This is rapidly accelerating the transition to e-commerce. The online shopping is experiencing a substantial growth over past few years with grocery to be the least contributing category. However, in this current situation, grocery category account for the largest share in the e-commerce orders. There is a surge in the average daily downloads for popular digital grocery apps such as Instacart, Walmart Grocery and Shipt in a month of time. Households that are relying on home delivery through online grocery shopping during the pandemic are likely to continue with the service then after. 

As a result of stockpiling, retailers are running out of stock and the grocery shelves for popular items sit empty. This erodes the consumer brand preference which is putting forward the products of small regional players in the market consumption. It will take time for the top market players to fill the demand-supply gap which can be a game changer for local as well as new brands of frozen food in the global market.

Frozen snacks are temperature sensitive and hence they need to be transported cautiously as the supply chain of frozen snacks uses different packaging and shipment measures compared to non-frozen snacks to maintain the freshness and prevent them from losing their nutritious values.