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By Ian Quinn2020-12-18T00:01:00+00:00
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Covid-19 has helped wipe £75m off chilled ready meals as millions of shoppers, either furloughed or working from home, picked up their pots and pans to practice their scratch cooking, and Brits made fewer trips to the supermarket.
These two factors helped drive a 3.7% value decline in fresh ready meals, the largest and most premium of the three ready meals sectors.
“Demand for ready meals purely on the basis of convenience, when an equivalent could easily be prepared from scratch, has sharply declined,” says Patrick Cairns, CEO of Charlie Bigham’s. “At the beginning of lockdown, total ready meals sales declined by more than 25%.”