Ask most people whether fresh or frozen is better and you get the same answer without much hesitation. It is worth knowing that for cooked, ready-to-eat food, the answer is usually the other way round — and the reason is mostly about ice crystals.
It is about how fast, not how cold
When food freezes slowly, water inside it forms large crystals. Those crystals puncture cell walls, and when the food thaws the damage shows up as liquid in the tray and a texture that has gone soft and grainy. This is what people are remembering when they say frozen food is watery.
Flash-freezing takes the food through the critical temperature range fast enough that the crystals stay very small. The cell structure survives largely intact, so when you reheat it, a lasagna still has layers and a curry still has pieces of beef rather than strands.
The nutritional argument
The other half of it is time. A chilled ready meal has a shelf life measured in days, and it spends those days slowly degrading — vitamin content falls, fats oxidise, texture drifts. A dish frozen within hours of cooking is essentially paused at the point it was made. Eighteen months later it is closer to how it left the kitchen than a five-day-old chilled equivalent is on day four.
What it means for waste
For retailers and food-service operators this is the part that shows up on the P&L. Chilled ready meals are a markdown business: you forecast, you over-order to avoid gaps, and you write off what does not sell. An eighteen-month frozen shelf life removes almost all of that pressure. You order to demand rather than to date.
Every dish we make goes into blast freezing at -18°C straight off the line, which is why the pack you open at home tastes the way it was meant to.