The Future of Frozen Fruits and Vegetables

As healthier, better-for-you trends continue to sweep through the industry, category leaders have dedicated their time to not only providing consumers with healthy alternatives but convenient ones as well. Suppliers helming the category are giving households the opportunity to enjoy the flavors and health benefits of fresh fruit but in frozen form, so that consumers aren't set up to fail when they attempt to eat all of their fresh fruit before it spoils. Frozen fruits and vegetables allow for households to reap the health benefits of clean eating without the hassle of making several trips to the store and without racing the clock to prevent wasting food that has spoilt.

Wawona Frozen Foods has been directing its efforts towards keto blends —fusing health attributes with satisfying flavors—and responding to Gen X and Gen Y consumers who continually demand convenience from the frozen fruits and vegetables category. “We are doing a lot of different things,” Wawona Frozen Foods President Bill Smittcamp previously said. “Whether it’s prepackaged bowls of acai or an oatmeal blend with our fresh frozen fruit on top. Or single serve smoothies that are continuing to grow. Here we’re buying A-grade fruit when all they’re going to do is grind it up. And so, we’re trying to figure out how to really customize some of our blends. We have a piece of equipment here that is making virtually an ice cube so we take a very chunky fruit puree, whether it’s peaches with strawberries, we’re taking mango bits and pieces and turning it into a chip.”

The frozen fruits and vegetables category is going to grow in step with the consumers who have disposable income, Townsend Farms President Mike Townsend previously said. “I would say right now those are going to grow with the segment that’s got spendable dollars,” Townsend said. “That will be the Boomers. There’s maybe 20 percent of them left. They’ll keep growing that sector and most of them want to be happy. They want to drop a few pounds. The rest of the folks, I don’t know. The rest of the people in their diet will they be willing to pay the price for frozen—organic or conventional. If we stress health and exercise, those people will eat smarter. I would say that we’re intuitive at putting fruit on all those different things. We’ve reached a point of maturity in that category.”

One of Seal the Seasons’ latest innovation was its smoothie kits. “Our smoothie kits are basically a convenient and easy way to make a smoothie shop quality smoothie at home without a lot of extra ingredients,” Seal The Seasons CEO Patrick Mateer previously said. “We’ve combined our best locally grown fruits with super food gem. Each bag you get is a berry blend, it’s delicious locally grown fruit. And then these super food gems throughout which depending on the flavor, like we have a plant-protein mix, the super food gems in there are pea protein, plant protein powder and powdered almond milk. All you do is add water, blend it up and suddenly you have a delicious plant protein strawberry banana smoothie. We’re really excited to bring these easy and functional smoothies to more Americans and help more people start their smoothie journey and explore more of the category. We wanted to make this product accessible and easy to try and a value product as well.”

Seal The Seasons is driving the category forward through “growing same store velocity, introducing more consumers to our core locally grown frozen fruits whether that’s continuing to partner with our retailers and merchandise the products well, offering these new varieties which will excite consumers and getting them to look further into the category,” Mateer said. “We really want to introduce these Ruby Junes. Show people that frozen food can be differentiated and a little bit special just like the Honeycrisp apple. With the innovation, we think there’s a lot more growth in this category. There’s a lot more innovative and better for you offerings that we can make it more convenient for people. Doing more value add and doing more innovation that is going to drive further category growth for our retailers. Just delivering the product every single time, on time. Often that can really drive category growth. In early 2022, we had a store fill out the entire shelf with our product because they couldn’t get it from anyone else. The power of local farmers and keeping the supply chain regional and in our community.”

At a time when suppliers are humbled by supply chain bottlenecks and inflationary pressures now more than ever, Wawona Frozen Foods is grateful for the partnerships it has established and nurtured. “Because of our relationship with the respective buyers, and us being a family-owned operation, we can call up the buyers and tell them what’s going on hopefully ahead of time,” Smittcamp said. “It’s all about communication and knowing what’s coming down the track. I don’t think we could pull many more rabbits out of our hats for excuses that we haven’t already used for the last 18 months or at least for the last year since whenever diesel started going up. The communication to our customers has been truthful and that’s how we’ve grown Wawona from a small company to where we are today. I’m a hands-on boss and I’ll go out and see something and ask, ‘What happened here?’ And I say well good, but I have 50 years of experience so why don’t you come in and say this is down and I might come up with a little bit better opportunity.”

Seal The Seasons implores retailers and consumers to remember that when they’re frustrated with delays and product shortages to remember “there’s a human on the other side of the computer screen and the telephone,” Mateer said. “I think we’re all trying the best we can to create the world we want to live in. I hope so. One of our core values here at Seal the Seasons is that we believe that if we want to change something about the world, if we’re passionate about it and we try hard enough, we can create that change. It doesn’t always happen overnight. You must be patient with people. You must come to people on their terms. But you must remember that everyone is human. We’ll occasionally get a call from someone who had a smushed berry in their bag. We treat them with kindness and it’s crazy how far that gets you when people apologize for their tone.”