(Bloomberg) -- Budget frozen food retailer Iceland Foods is reducing the amount of chilled food it sells to try to lower the business’s energy bills. 

The supermarket chain is stocking more room-temperature products instead of chilled, Chairman Richard Walker said in a phone interview. Iceland is also using more modern fridges, putting doors on warehouse fridges and putting solar panels on stores and warehouses to be more energy efficient.

The grocer will continue to focus on frozen goods which are seeing higher sales as shoppers try to save money and cut down on food waste. 

“We probably got a bit carried away in the pandemic with the amount of chilled products we had available so we’re just really scaling our chilled proposition back slightly,” Richard Ewen, Iceland’s finance director, said on the same call.  Switching off some of the fridges is “a big energy saving,” he said.

Soaring electricity prices have put pressure on Iceland as the business predominantly sells frozen products. Higher bills reduced gross profit by £46 million ($56 million) in the first half but Iceland expects the burden to reduce in the next financial year as it negotiates new fixed contracts at lower prices.

“For sure the pricing has come off on the wholesale market,” said Walker. “It’s still uncomfortably high but we’re a lot better than where we were.”

Iceland’s sales grew 14% in the four weeks to Christmas, according to Kantar data, and customer numbers grew by 35% as shoppers sought to save money amid the cost-of-living crisis.

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