Birds Eye on making frozen a ‘go-to’ not a ‘fallback’

As a leading brand in the frozen category, Birds Eye is looking to “champion” what frozen food has to offer consumers, says its marketing director Claire Sutton.

Frozen is a category with fresh, healthy and versatile products, she tells Marketing Week, however, it’s also a category that can often be overlooked.

Sutton joined Nomad Foods, which owns Birds Eye as well as Goodfellas, Aunt Bessie’s and other frozen brands, just over six months ago, having previously worked in ambient foods.

“One of the stats that got me when I first joined was how many times you open the fridge in your home versus how many times you open the freezer,” she says, noting that people may be more than five times more likely to do the former.

How can we reframe and get people to see the freezer and frozen food as a go-to rather than a fallback?

Claire Sutton, Birds Eye

Therefore, one of the key things Birds Eye is contending with is ensuring people see the freezer, the frozen category, and crucially, its brands, as relevant more often in their lives.

“How can we reframe and get people to see the freezer and frozen food as a go-to rather than a fallback?” Sutton says.

Birds Eye has got both a category job and a brand job to do, she notes, adding that while separate these are extremely “intertwined”. Given that it is the number one brand in the category “getting people to feel more warmly” about the category benefits the brand, and vice versa.

Driving relevance and preference for the frozen category requires leaning on both rational and emotional cues to position itself as the go-to not a fallback, Sutton notes.

“We’re the number one brand and we really want to be the frozen champion in the UK,” she says.

Adjusting to consumer habits

One of the rational positive elements of the frozen category that Birds Eye seeks to emphasise is its health credentials. There is currently a great deal of consumer conversation about the healthiness of certain foods, for example, through the lens of ultra-processed food.

Sutton says that Birds Eye produces healthy food that falls on “the right side” of many of these discussions.

“We make really good food, and in the frozen category, it is really good food with ingredients that you would find in your kitchen,” she says.

While the products don’t need to necessarily change, Birds Eye’s job is ensuring consumers are aware of the health credentials of its brand.

One element of adjusting to consumers’ increasing preference for healthy food is emphasising the credentials of existing products while another is innovation. Birds Eye has introduced a range of high-protein frozen ready meals in the form of its ‘Get Real’ range. These products are designed to have as few ingredients as possible, as well as cater to health-conscious consumers.A ‘beacon’ for beans: How one brand is making space for a category that ‘doesn’t exist’

As well as an increasing eye on health, another growing consumer trend has been the rise in popularity of air fryers, with 58% of UK households now using one, according to the Good Food Nation 2024 Study.

While, again, many of Birds Eye’s products are already set up to play into this trend, with many frozen foods being ideal to be cooked in air fryers, the brand’s job is to ensure it comes to mind for consumers as they introduce more air fryer-cooked meals into their routines.

To this end, the brand has recently partnered with home appliances brand Tefal to spotlight “healthy, time-saving” meals.

“We’re trying really hard to understand how people’s cooking habits are changing,” Sutton says, stating that the next step is making sure its range is fit for those habits.

“It’s not necessarily always innovation and new products,” she says. “It’s how we think about how we package existing products and how we cook existing products.”

Emotional connection with the brand

In terms of Birds Eye’s goals as a brand, there are three broad “buckets”, Sutton says.

“We talk about being salient and top of mind, making sure that we’re relevant, that we’re really fitting into modern lifestyles, and making sure we make really good food so that it’s worth it and that people want to buy it,” she says.

That involves a mix of product work, as well as campaigns to build emotional connection, she notes. In August, the brand launched a new masterbrand campaign, ‘That’s a Recipe for a Life Well-Fed’, designed at capturing the power of frozen food to bring people together.

While building the category requires both rational and emotional work, Sutton says that the brand job is “a little bit more emotional”. The masterbrand campaign brings this emotional side to life by capturing everyday moments.

“We’re reframing the brand and making sure our products are the hero,” says Sutton.

Retaining ‘icon’ status

Birds Eye is a very well-known brand in the UK, but it needs to make sure that it remains relevant to all possible consumers. Sutton gives the example of the ‘Chicken Shop’ range.

That product range is designed to bring the feel of a takeaway, at home, through the Birds Eye products.

“What we deliberately set out to do was to try and bring younger people into the brand and into frozen, because they are the group that are probably involved in frozen less,” Sutton says.Brands need foresight, not just insight, to survive and grow

She hails the success of that, stating that the majority of people buying into the range are younger people new to the brand.

While expanding the appeal of the brand and frozen more broadly is key to Birds Eye’s mission, reaffirming the brand’s “icon” status is a major focus. She gives the example of Birds Eye fish fingers.

“It’s about how our brands are perceived, to make sure that we can appeal to the UK and do it in a way that’s really distinctive, that builds on our heritage, but that is transformative in terms of how we go moving forward,” she says. “How that fish finger retains its icon status is a key challenge.”