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Driven by a rise in freezer and microwave oven ownership, a decline in the number of families sitting down to eat together and an increase in one and two-person households, total sales of ready meals in the UK continue to grow.

The ready meals market is broken down into three distinct categories – chilled, frozen and room temperature or ambient foods. In the UK, sales of chilled foods outstrip those of frozen produce by a significant margin. This is due, in no small part, to years of clever marketing that has convinced the British public that chilled meals are fresher and healthier than the frozen alternative.

There are however, indications that consumer opinion might be shifting. The frozen ready meals market is growing as more people begin to understand that freezing is in itself a preservative and (compared to chilled food) fewer chemicals and other preservatives are required to move frozen ready meals through the supply chain.

The bigger retailers – who, needless to say, dominate the ready meals market – are understood to be watching the apparent rekindling of the public's interest in frozen products, keenly. They would appear to have much to gain by nurturing the upturn in demand.

At present a high proportion of all chilled ready meals fail to sell by their ‘best before' or ‘sell by' date. Unsold produce goes to landfill and its disposal is costing the food industry and the supermarkets millions of pounds every year. By contrast, frozen ready meals have a much longer ‘shelf life' and retailers and their suppliers would expect to significantly reduce this high level of wastage if a genuine swing away from chilled towards frozen products could be engineered and encouraged to take hold.

Any significant growth in sales of frozen ready meals is likely to have repercussions for the cold chain the logistics sector, as John Maguire, sales and marketing director of leading articulated forklift truck manufacturer Narrow Aisle explains: "Historically, the frozen ready meal's lack of customer appeal, has meant that the majority of frozen produce stored within cold storage facilities has been primary foodstuffs such as meat, vegetables, bread etc," he says. "A high percentage of these products have usually been stored and distributed as full pallet loads and there has been little demand for complex order picking and order assembly processes within Britain's cold stores.

"As more frozen ready meals enter the market, cold stores are facing growing demand for greater pallet selectivity and replenishment and customer order assembly and, as a result, need to be able to adopt the storage and picking methods of the chilled and dry grocery products sector."

Narrow Aisle has a number of customers who specialise in cold storage and this need to deliver greater pallet selectivity and order assembly is changing the way many of them run their operations.

"For instance," explains John, "one of our clients – a third party warehousing company – stores frozen ready meals on behalf of one of the growing band of small businesses to have entered the sector. The firm is enjoying considerable success producing premium quality ‘home-made' food in small batches, blast freezing it and selling it though delicatessens, farm shops and on-line outlets.

"Traditionally the majority of movements in and out of the store had been full pallet loads. However, the success of its frozen ready meal-producing client forced the storage company to reconfigure its cold store to allow individual customer orders to be assembled.

"At first the company considered installing very narrow aisle trucks guided by either steel rails or inductive wires cut into the floor. However, the client decided against going down this route because, it was felt, that steel guide rails would limit access to key ground level picking locations. Furthermore, the proposed aisle dimensions were too narrow for low level order picking."

Eventually the company settled upon a combination of Flexi articulated trucks and low level order pickers. The Flexi does not require wire guidance or steel rails and therefore the aisle width could be set to suit the customer's order assembly profile. The lack of steel guide rails meant that the first rack beam could be set at two metres to allow fast case picking.

Within any cold storage facility it is essential to get maximum product density and at another 3PL cold store operator's site a combination of powered mobile racking and Flexi trucks has allowed storage density to be optimised while at the same time allowing individual pallet accessibility.

The previous occupiers of Norish's cold store site at Gillingham had operated