Frozen food in the high street (Iceland.co.uk)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Iceland.co.uk
Date:	25/11/09 (103 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Huge range of frozen stuff, some of it very good

Disadvantages: A few very unfortunate ready meal products, such as the frozen Doner. Enough said.

It has to count as a peskier example of one of those truths, universally acknowledged, that as soon as you find a product sold at 'Iceland' freezer shop that you really, really like, they'll invariably soon stop stocking it.

I encountered this first time round with a truly delicious Thai frozen prawn dim-sum / dumpling soup product retailing at £1.99 that Iceland used to sell (just add water and it was ready after a mere 3 minutes in the microwave!), and then all of a sudden stopped - the tragedy of this being that they kept it in stock for many months; so long in fact, that I was lulled into a false sense of security and never took a note of the name of the manufacturers of the product, and so now I stand no chance of ever finding anyone else who sells it again (Alta-Vistaing the basic details to try and find the manufacturer was no help). While scouring the frozen seafood section in search of the out-of-stock dim sum I then encountered a frozen scallops in garlic butter dish - from Iceland's own range of products this time. Again, it was really good - but within a couple of months that had become unavailable, too.

The take-home message here apparently being t hat unless the Iceland product you like is an absolutely bog-standard ready meal or convenience product of the pizza, bulk-buy ice cream or frozen potato / diced vegetable variety, then you'd better enjoy it to the full during the narrow time-window when it is still being sold, otherwise one day you'll turn at the shop to find that that frozen food range has simply vanished without trace.

In some cases this is probably a good thing. Iceland freezer shops are laid out in a 'shopping by product type' arrangement. As you go in the door (at the time of writing; infuriatingly, they seem to change the layout of the contents of the freezer cabinet in a subtle to drastic manner every few months) there are freezers containing 'specials' to the right of you (Christmas 'Party Food' offerings at this time of year) and to the left your frozen 'takeaway meals' section (yes, I know it might seem odd to be buying your 'takeaway' frozen, but that's just the way of it) which includes some seriously scary-looking and alarmingly under-priced offerings - the frozen Doner Kebab for less than £2 being a case in point. In this area you can also buy a frozen portion of chips with curry sauce - the kind of 'meal' that nobody should be sad to see that Iceland was no longer selling, since its only saving grace really is that to purchase such a snack, a person would usually have to walk at least some distance to their nearest chippy or takeaway.

Further into the shop there is a small fresh food section includiing bread and milk and a selection of basic fruit and veg, and then cook-chill items including a whole lot of preserved pork products as well as quiches and pies. Then you have sections of freezers labelled frozen meat, poultry, seafood, pies, potato products, veg, desserts, etc. Iceland is also a 'bottle' shop - you can buy beer , wine and spirits as well as preserved canned / bottled goods (eg. Helman's Mayonnaise, which is usually on some kind of special offer) here. Anything currently recognized as being bad for you in fact; they also sell lots of multi-pack packets of crisps and chocolate snacks too. As to the alcohol, I used to quite regularly buy my cheap bottles of three-for-a-tenner or £4 a bottle red wine here and I always found it was of notably poorer quality - I mean significantly worse than I would expect a similarly-priced product bought from another supermarket or the off-licence to be.

The prices at Iceland are very reasonable in general and they have a 'by the nearest quid' pricing policy that makes your shopping bill easy to tot-up. Some of the stuff they sell I think is on the pretty poor side - I mean some of the cheaper ready meals and especially and particularly a lot of the party food - but even given the 'Mums go to Iceland', and their more recent 'Party like a celebrity' TV advertising campaigns, (both of which for some reason seem to focus entirely on what I'd think of as being the worst of Iceland products), there are a surprising amount of good to very good things on sale here too. They're pretty good for frozen fish, at the very least.

Summary: Good frozen food shopping at Iceland