Last year saw sales of refrigerated foods drifting back closer to normal after a pandemic-fueled peak in 2020.

We are now accepting entries for our 2021 Best New Refrigerated Retail Products Contest. Similar to our recent frozen foods contest, we'll select 25 finalists for daily voting throughout the month of August on our website. The top-five with the most votes will be highlighted in a special section of our December magazine, and the overall winner will also be featured on an episode of our Cold Corner podcast.

Editor-in-Chief Michael Costa explains how the perception of frozen foods changed in 2020.

In this excerpt from our Cold Corner Podcast, we go one-on-one with Nestlé’s Ryan Riddle about R&D strategies for plant-based foods.

The headline for last year’s Top 25 Refrigerated Foods Processors Report read, “Refrigerated Foods to Reign Supreme in 2020”. In no other year than 2020 could a headline that bold be an understatement. 

With the final FSMA IA rule in effect for small businesses since July and large businesses a year before that, coupled with changes to the food supply chain in response to the pandemic, risk assessment and mitigation should be a priority now more than ever. For the refrigeration and frozen food industry specifically, changes have also evolved with the implementation of the Sanitary Transportation rule.

On our latest From the Cold Corner Podcast, Editor-in-Chief Michael Costa catches up with Ryan Riddle, senior R&D specialist for plant-based meal solutions at Nestlé and its Sweet Earth brand. They talk about why refrigerated and frozen plant-based foods are so popular today, which consumer markets are key targets for plant-based foods, how Nestlé incorporates its plant-based products into the brand’s freezer-aisle favorites like DiGiorno Pizza and Stouffer’s, plus much more.

How fleet adaptability can help distributors weather e-commerce and coronavirus challenges.

Looking back on what we’ll call 2020 B.C. (Before Coronavirus), the pipeline for cold storage construction was already robust and healthy. According to research by commercial real estate firm CBRE, overall industrial construction—which encompasses cold storage, along with warehouses, distribution centers, manufacturing facilities, self-storage, office and flex space—was at 298 million square feet (MSF) before COVID-19, bolstered by the ongoing rise of e-commerce. 

Our annual July State of the Industry issue is now ready to read in our redesigned digital magazine--even easier to navigate than before. We also feature our annual North American Refrigerated & Frozen Foods Warehouse Guide. put together with the help of the Global Cold Chain Alliance. In this issue, we dive deeper into how COVID-19 has not just impacted, but altered many areas of the cold foods supply chain the first half of 2020. It's a mid-year snapshot that also serves as a map for what will likely continue the rest of the year.