True, but we get taxed higher… and all that VAT to pay (and ready meals to buy!).
jjim, the best Indian food I’ve ever had in a restaurant was in the UK. Balti…yummmmm
Usram, Trader Joe’s won’t have its chilled meals up online because they seem to change the selections once in a while, but they do sell stuff beyond the prep mix type items. They’ll have spaghetti and meatballs, roast chicken, dozens of salads, really bad sushi, roast fish etc.etc…
However, the biggest selection of “chilled” food I’ve ever seen is at Whole Foods (or the Whole Paycheck as most people call it). It’s a very upscale grocery store that focuses on selling organic or very over-priced produce and gourmet items. Oftentimes the exact same thing will sell at TJs for significantly less. However, they have a very significant “chilled” food section with a lot of variety in cuisines. At mine, which is slightly smaller compared to the one I saw once in Vegas, we have an extensive salad bar, deli/prepared foods section of mostly gourmet stuff (baked salmon, risotto cakes, roast turkey), a sushi counter, another salad bar that has lots of chilled pre-made pastas, falafel, 1/2 a salad bar that has a hot foods selection and then another entire case of “chilled foods” including several types of “meals to go” (roast chicken, rice, steamed veggies), vietnamese spring rolls. Oh yeah, and then a raw foods chilled section for “raw foodies” who don’t want to cook.
You can eat pretty healthfully and with some cuisine variety from their chilled foods department (well, as long as you like your ethnic foods gringoised). The only problem is that it can be very, very expensive if you did it routinely. At least at mine, the chilled/pre-made foodstuffs seem to cater to single high-income professionals who come home too exhausted to cook but don’t want to pay a tip. So they’ll buy a chilled meal at WF for whatever, 8-10$ all inclusive rather than make it for a total value of $3 or less.
There’s a big difference between this kind of meal and the ones we’re talking about. Ours are very much marketed as being an affordable as well as easy alternative to cooking a meal, especially for individual portions.
Although that is true for most chilled ready meals I have also noticed that more expensive brands are becoming available. We have a very expensive delicatessen in town and they have started selling chilled meals costing over £10 a portion.
Fuck me, in Newark, not London?
Trader Joe’s chilled meals are affordable. However, their frozen stuff is about a million times tastier. TJs isn’t nationwide, yet, though.
Whole Paycheck is indeed expensive for single servings prices but Whole Foods is way more expensive than regular grocery stores as a whole. They are serving a different clientele. Regular grocery stores have chilled stuff too but the extent, quality and variety depends on the chain and geographic area. I’ve never been to a normal grocery store that had chilled foods in the variety and level of quality at Whole Foods, though.
But what are you paying for yours…the equivalent of a couple of dollars? Generally copping out to something from Whole Foods will cost me from $7-10, though I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I didn’t stuff McGreasy down my gullet. I only do it once in a while, though, because $7-10 adds up and I’ve learned to make food on the weekend and siphon off of it gradually.
There’s a lasagne sitting in my fridge which cost £2. So in a cost-of-living comparison, yes.
Tesco does different ranges eg the bog standard “bangers and mash” is about $3, whereas the “Finest” range “Tube de viande épicée avec pomme de terre et sauce au jus d’oignon”* is about $6. The former is a servicable tasty treat, the latter is actually pretty damn good.
- It’s actually not called that
I think it would afect distribution a lot. Frozen meals can be made in bulk in a factory in, say, California, stored for weeks, and then shipped to the east coast over several days where they can sit in a grocer’s freezer for more weeks. There’s no way a chilled meal would survive that. The distances in the UK are so much smaller. (the US is 39 times as large as the UK)
I would guess chilled food probably has a shelf life of maybe a week or so. So it would have to shipped from some place relatively close by so have any kind of decent shelf life. Not impossible but it means a lot more local coordination, harder and more expensive than just a few national factories. Plus, I think a lot of people like the convenience of buying a whole stack of frozen meals on sale and keeping them stowed in their freezers, for chilled meals, you’d have to eat them fairly quickly.
I do think as Americans become more discriminating in their food choices (which I think is happening, proved by the popularity of the “upscale” groceries like Whole Foods and Trader Joes), we’ll see more demand for chilled meals. 7-11 is a good example. Until a few years ago, they used to exclusively stock prepackaged convenience foods. But recently, they’ve contracted with local suppliers to have fresh sandwiches and pastries made to their specifications and delivered to their stores.
You can definitely get pre-made pasta even from Whole Foods for cheaper but I don’t eat pasta. They have some sort of lasagne counter that sells it for 5 to 6 dollars a pound (the cheapest kind, they have more frou frou kinds). I don’t know how many people eat a pound of lasagne but guesstimate that a 1/2 a pound will cost you $3. But you can make a lot of lasagne/pasta for much cheaper than that.
Heck, you can get a piece of their brick oven pizza for a couple of dollars. It just depends on the quantity and type of food you’re talking about.
Pasta? Cheap
Soups? Cheap
Pizza? Cheap (for an individual serving)
Salad bar? Very Expensive
Anything remotely ethnic? Expensive (you can get 2 tofu spring rolls for the same price as a lot more pizza or lasagne). And sushi is obviously going to be marked up.
Whole Balanced Meal in a nice little chilled box (some lean cut of meat, vegetable, starch)? Expensive
The healthier and the better the quality of ingredients needed-the more expensive everything becomes for obvious reasons. But the type of people who would shop at Whole Foods are looking for that so they’ll likely spend on it.
I will say that the last time I was in the UK I was really impressed by the grocery stores and all the premade stuff. Not to mention the individual servings of mixed drinks.
We have some very high-class establishments in Newark. We have the only Waitrose in the whole of Nottinghamshire. Café Blau which has won the award for the best restaurant in Nottinghamshire for three years running, and not one, but two very expensive delicatessens in town !
I’ve already answered this - there’s no reason to talk about shipping the meals across the continent. The economies of scale which work for a single factory supplying a supermarket chain throughout the UK would work for supplying stores throughout California, or New England, or Florida. A small network of factories, each producing similar quantities to what’s done by one here.
And the shelf life of some meals is more like a month.
You know, I can’t say I’ve seen a chilled ready meal with that kind of shelf life (and as you may gather, I’ve bought a lot of them 
). More like a week, tops.
On the distribution question, some of these products are made in the Netherlands. That must be a twelve hour journey to shelves in some British stores. So unless the US food industry is so governed by economies of scale that there’s one vast food factory in St. Louis or somewhere supplying the whole nation, I don’t see why it couldn’t be served by regional factories serving stores within maybe 400 miles. It presumably means that food manufacturers have to very careful about logistical matters such as ordering ingredients just in time, and it would probably make chilled meals a little more expensive than frozen ones, but those are cheaper here too and yet chilled meals are still flying off the shelves.
In Australia it is easy to get a range of frozen and chilled meals at a variety of places. The average large supermarket will at least have a limited range. Sometimes it may involve selecting precut meat, a bag of prepared vegetables and a container of sauce. Most butchers now sell “value added” meat and poultry that is pre prepared, marinated and ready to cook.
Do Americans have businesses like Lenard’s which is a franchise of chicken stores providing a huge array of prepared, ready to cook meals?
Just chicken? I can’t think of any place that does just chicken, at least not in a similiar way. The closest I can think of to that might be Boston Market, which is both eat-in and takeout. They have chicken, turkey, roast beef and meatloaf. There’s not a lot of variety to it, but it is good stick-to-your-ribs simple food, and one thing they do every year is offer holiday meals. You can order an entire meal for Thankgiving or Christmas, pick it up, pop it in the oven when the time is right and eat until you bust.
I don’t see how. Most frozen meals, at least here, can be taken directly from the freezer to the oven, no thawing involved. Depending on the type of food, it may take a little longer to cook, but that’s the only difference I can think of.
I didn’t visit Marks & Spencer, but I did visit Harrod’s food hall. I didn’t expect anything there to be cheap and I know there’s no comparison to a regular grocery store. It was a lot of fun to visit though, as we don’t have anything comparable here in the U.S. Department stores here don’t sell food, unless you count the tins of chocolates and such they may have for holiday gift-giving, or the fact that some of the larger fancier ones may have a restaurant. anu-la1979 mentioned Whole Foods - that is about as close as we’d come to Harrod’s food hall, but all Whole Foods sells is food, plants and flowers and supplements. Where I live, we also have a place called Southern Season, which has a large variety of chilled meals and foods, along with cooking equipment and supplies and other gourmet items, but it is eye-poppingly expensive as well. The grocery store I have been using the last 10 years or so has always sold a selection of chilled meals in the deli section, and while it is good, it is more expensive than the frozen food they sell. Most of the meals are in the $5 to $7 range.
Yeah, if things were set up that way, it could work though not quite as cheaply. But that’s not how things developed. Currently, they package the meals somewhat close to where the food is harvested and then store it and ship it around the country. Centralization for greater economies of scale has been a large driving force in the US industries. Can’t you see that it would be easier to develop a chilled food supplier network when you only have to supply 95,000 square miles as opposed to 3.7 million?
And, as I noted, some stores are going towards more local producing. But, there hadn’t been a large enough demand for chilled meals here yet. I think it’s developing (I personally can’t stand frozen meals, and mostly survive on take-out meals from Whole Foods) but up until now you have your bargin and convenience shoppers who want the very cheap frozen meals they can just keep on hand in the freezer for long periods of time.