Shadowing Practice: Why Americans Love Frozen Food - Learn English Speaking with Video
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In 2022, frozen food sales in the U.S.
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reached over $72 billion.
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Demand has been rapidly growing.
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Throughout Covid, we had among the highest sales in all of the food space.
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Behind this seemingly simple idea, there's a sophisticated supply chain keeping perishables frozen.
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Each step is very critical.
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The products have to maintain proper temperature throughout a complex network of refrigerated trucks and cold storage facilities.
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Should the temperature vary, it can become unsafe.
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But it's not just about keeping ice cream from melting.
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The percentages are remarkable in terms of what's tossed and frozen items because of inadequate cold storage temperature.
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And the refrigeration tech is often outdated.
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We're still relying on centuries old technology.
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The weak link in cold chain logistics, planes, trains, automobiles is how to deliver any perishable good at the appropriate temperature.
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Major players in the global frozen food market include privately-held Cargill, Conagra, Nestlé, General Mills and Unilever.
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So the consumers are buying more frozen product, it's going to require more storage capability and a more efficient supply chain.
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The perishables are poised to profit, and so are those investing in really cold properties.
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Supply chain issues and labor challenges haven't really gone away in the food industry.
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Where's the stuff?
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Without resilient supply chain infrastructure, the growth and safety of the massive $265 billion global frozen food market is at risk.
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Can cold storage supply chains keep up with frozen food demand? Virtually all American households purchase frozen food at least once a year.
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Since 2019, sales have grown by 23%, according to the American Frozen Food Institute.
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When Covid happened, when supply chain, everything got shut down, you saw a huge spike in frozen food, sometimes 30%, 40%, 50% year over year basis.
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Frozen foods demand was supercharged during the pandemic in the U.S., bringing in over $65 billion in 2020.
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The pandemic taught consumers to invest in bulk buying. Frozen foods were some of the best selling items during the pandemic, since they can be really stored for long periods of time.
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We're seeing that growth continue.
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We saw about a 20% growth during Covid, which was really very rapid and fast.
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Most frozen food products reported double digit increases.
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We did a recent survey and found that over 80% of consumers looked to frozen to reduce in-home food waste and also save money.
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The main driver is cost.
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What can consumers afford?
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A great study by Cornell that looked into how much waste the average consumer has between both fresh and frozen. And what they found was with frozen food, you're five times more likely not to encounter food waste.
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Every year, roughly $1,300 is spent by the average American on food that ends up as waste.
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You know, Cargill produces enough protein to feed 170 million people around the world.
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So that's enough to feed the entire country of Bangladesh every single day.
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The frozen category, really seeing things like variety meats more likely to be purchased frozen.
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At the end of the day. It's about that 4 p.m.
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dinner tonight decision, right?
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A great variety of dinners is promised.
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The dinner is packed and ready for subzero storage.
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The industry has come a long way since the 1930s, when Clarence Birdseye pioneered a flash freezing technique that better preserved foods.
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Before then, the market was known for a tasteless and textureless products.
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Quick freezing is one of the newer ways of keeping foods, meat, fruit, vegetables.
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He won consumers over.
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I'm sorry, but I already have a frozen food man.
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In the 1950s and '60s became the golden age of food freezing.
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Birdseye Hawaiian style international vegetables.
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That flash freezing technique is still how a lot of frozen products are made today, particularly with mechanical freezing.
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Think frozen plates and conveyor belts for contact freezing or the air blast method, which is one of the oldest and commonly used.
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That's when cold air fills a room of food to freeze it.
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Freezing technology really hasn't gained leaps and bounds.
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Flash freezing.
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And what that means is, let's say strawberries are coming out of a field in California, we'll take those warm strawberries out of the field as soon as they're cleaned, and then we'll blast them down to -20 degrees and then store them so then later they can be consumed.
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The air blasting technique also utilizes individual quick freezing, aka IKF.
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IKF, what it does is it freeze individual pieces of food, and that does two things.
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One, the speed of the freezing helps reduce the size of the ice crystal.
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So it helps preserve the integrity of the food when it's thawed or cooked.
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You want to freeze at that peak of freshness.
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And that's really an aspect that whether you look at meat or vegetables, a lot of industries have really focused on communicating that message as well.
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The other way food can be frozen is cryogenic freezing. It uses liquid nitrogen or carbon dioxide to get to extremely low temperatures quickly, but it can be more expensive for companies to invest and switch to the cryogenic techniques, plus the cost of nitrogen added to that.
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However, cryogenic freezing is much faster since that liquid nitrogen is so cold.
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One estimate puts mechanical freezing at nearly an hour to freeze fruits and veggies, while cryogenic freezing could take 11 minutes.
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It's all about speed.
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The faster food can freeze, the smaller ice crystals that form, which ultimately creates a higher quality product.
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Our data scientists heard that we were not blasting strawberries fast enough in California.
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The algorithm, based on computational fluid dynamics that were able to reduce the freeze cycle from three days down to one to two days.
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So not only are you reducing the lead time of freezing the berries, but we're using less energy to do that.
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How to freeze food is just the first half of the equation. Frozen foods need a robust and sustainable cold storage supply chain to reach consumers. Even Birdseye recognized this in the late 1920s when convincing Americans to try Frosted Foods, He created his own refrigerated boxcars for trains and leased freezers out to retailers.
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The U.S. still transports a lot of food by truck.
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In the U.S., we're very fortunate, but in other developing countries we're seeing an investment in the cold chain to try and keep the agricultural products preserved for year-round consumption.
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It's really a way of preventing food waste globally.
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Approximately 13% of all food produced globally is lost due to poor cold storage every year.
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That wasted food could have fed an estimated 950 million people.
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Tenth annual Disruptor 50 list, our fastest growing private companies challenging public incumbents.
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Number three, Lineage Logistics, improving the food supply chain to prevent waste with a proprietary freezing process.
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Lineage serves big name customers, including Walmart and McDonald's.
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Lineage Logistics focuses on the frozen food market, and part of its mission is decreasing global food waste.
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And so we provide frozen and chilled warehousing, 450 warehouses across 20 countries.
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Let's use salmon as an example.
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Salmon will be harvested up in the Pacific Northwest. Salmon will immediately be packaged, put into one of our freezers that packaged salmon across the country, may go to a retail store and then finally to the consumers at home. It may end up moving to a restaurant where the final consumer then purchases.
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But we're helping to move that food through the entire cold chain and ensuring that it keeps a safe temperature the entire way.
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The supply chain weaknesses garnered international attention when the coronavirus pandemic struck.
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Covid really showed how fragile the supply chain system is. That really exposed huge gaps in being able to transport in frozen food and even refrigerated food in the U.S..
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At the same time, it's expensive to generate power to keep the entire supply chain frozen.
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Being able to minimize costs in different ways, whether you're using different software, AI, robotics, freezing technology, driverless technology to transport the product from point A to point B, like that is the biggest pinpoint.
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Our data scientists have looked at the space that's used in our freezers because they consume a lot of energy and we want to make sure that we're using every square inch of that facility with frozen food.
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They've created algorithms to be able to see where are we not using some of that cubic space and how can we optimize that usage?
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We have been able to create over 300,000 additional pallet positions of frozen food that is equivalent to a 3,000,000 square foot freezer.
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Food waste also contributes to unnecessary emissions, and that's a ticking time bomb that Phononic aims to defuze.
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Number 17 on the list is Photonics, a semiconductor company that is reinventing the refrigerator.
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Through the power of semiconductor innovation, we are sustainably transforming global cooling, so core to our platform is a semiconductor chip that when powered, generates coldness.
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Phononic embraces solid state cooling with semiconductor devices that cool and freeze products in the cold chain fulfillment process.
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So Phononic really developed the ecosystem, and now we're delivering solutions poised to disrupt an almost $50 billion global market.
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Cold is super hot if you're in the cold storage warehouse business.
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Why? It's because of your Amazon Fresh, your Peapod by Giant. The new food delivery service is driving it literally from the warehouse to your home.
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Online grocery sales soared over the pandemic.
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Feeling frozen food sales with a 75% increase in 2020.
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It's expensive right now to ship by e-commerce frozen products because it needs to stay cold.
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How do we get product either from retail to the consumer using e-commerce and or from other distribution points straight to the consumer?
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While that may be convenient for a consumer, it makes warehouse management a nightmare.
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So much so that now in almost every case, retailers lose almost $13 in an online grocery delivery. Phononic developed an end-to-end cold chain solution, not just hardware that includes actively refrigerated and frozen totes, but also the IoT connectivity that allows the consumer to know exactly where their order is from the minute it was placed to the time that they pick it up.
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Phononic is releasing these reusable totes to grocery stores and retailers.
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And that gives the grocer the warehouse and the last mile delivery solutions provider tremendous flexibility, saving labor, saving on energy costs, but more importantly, increasing order throughput to meet those online demands.
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We're seeing the e-commerce side of the cold chain growing and we've acquired two companies to really be able to give us some infrastructure there because it does require a different layout of the facility and different technology.
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And while the number of households buying online leveled out in 2022, what continued to grow was the frequency of orders and the money spent per order.
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The pandemic surge in frozen food consumption has shown staying power from purchases in stores to online orders.
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I don't see that changing at all.
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To be able to not only feed yourself, but feed your family something that it doesn't take two hours to cook.
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That is a huge factor as well.
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That's driving frozen food sales.
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I like to call it the convenience continuum.
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So when you think from a consumer standpoint, it's the "let me do it, do it with me or do it for me." And frozen foods can really play in all three of those spaces.
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Between the demand growth, retailer engagement and industry innovations, the frozen food market is looking strong, according to the American Frozen Food Institute.
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They want cold and frozen items in particular, almost instantaneously.
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So we view ourselves as not just a facilitator of coldness, but a facilitator of e-commerce itself.
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Once consumers get used to the convenience, it's really tough to go back.
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Why practice speaking with this video?
Engaging with the video titled "Why Americans Love Frozen Food" provides an excellent opportunity to learn English with YouTube by exploring a topic that combines relevance and practicality. The discussion around frozen food trends can enhance your vocabulary and comprehension skills, particularly in the context of everyday conversations about food and consumer habits.
Practicing speaking alongside the video allows learners to mimic pronunciations, intonations, and pacing used by native speakers, thus improving fluency. Shadow speak techniques, where you repeat phrases right after hearing them, can help reinforce understanding and retention of vocabulary related to food and supply chains. This video serves as a rich resource for IELTS speaking practice, allowing learners to articulate thoughts on economic trends and personal preferences about food products.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
- Passive Voice: The speaker often uses passive constructions, such as "frozen food sales in the U.S. reached over $72 billion." This highlights the importance of the action over the subject and is helpful for learners to understand different sentence structures.
- Comparative Structures: Phrases like "growing by 23%" help learners practice forming comparatives, essential for making comparisons in English.
- Conditional Clauses: The phrase "should the temperature vary" illustrates conditionals, which are crucial for discussing hypothetical situations—especially in debates about food safety.
- Quantifiers: Expressions like "over 80% of consumers" and "roughly $1,300" teach numbers and quantifiers, enhancing speaking fluency when discussing statistics and research findings.
Common Pronunciation Traps
While shadowing the video, pay attention to specific words and phrases that could be challenging. For instance, the word "sophisticated" can be tricky. It’s pronounced /səˈfɪs.tɪ.keɪ.tɪd/ and often gets mispronounced by learners. Additionally, terms like "perishables" and "refrigerated" can be tongue twisters, especially when spoken at a natural pace. Practicing these through a shadowing app can help you master their pronunciation.
Another key point is to listen for the American accent, particularly in phrases like "supply chain" and "food waste." These words are essential in discussions about the food industry. Shadowing native speakers will help in mitigating these pronunciation traps, giving learners the confidence to engage in conversations.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been · haven't really gone · have grown |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is often outdated · are poised · was supercharged |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | Covid, which was · method, which is |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.