Turning around Poundland will not be easy, so it shouldn’t be surprising that its plan includes some fairly drastic measures.

The restructuring plan, announced this morning and still subject to High Court approval, includes an initial 68 store closures. Poundland anticipates that number will rise as it seeks rent reductions on other sites. It expects the process to leave it with an estate of 650-700 stores, down from about 800 today.

It is also pulling the plug on online sales, ending a journey it embarked on four years ago, including buying Poundshop.com and its warehouse in Bilston, West Midlands, in 2022.

The Perks loyalty app, which rolled out across the UK last year, is also being pulled, despite months of piloting in the Isle of Wight, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

But perhaps the biggest surprise is Poundland’s plan to remove its frozen food offering from stores, and reduce its chilled offer to its £3 meal deal and other essentials such as milk.

Poundland’s frozen retreat

The frozen range was for years central to Poundland’s plan to grow basket spend, by taking a bit of spend from supermarkets.

“It begins to cement us in customers’ minds as a genuine top-up if not full weekly shop,” MD Barry Williams told The Grocer in 2020, explaining Poundland’s acquisition of frozen foods retailer Fulton’s Foods.

Now the Fulton’s warehouse Poundland got in that deal – in Darton, South Yorkshire – is set to close later this year, followed by the site it got in the Poundshop.com deal early in 2026.

Retreating from frozen food appears to take Poundland in the opposite direction to its biggest direct competitors. Home Bargains has two aisles of chest freezers in its biggest stores, and operations director Paul Rowland recently told The Grocer it was resonating well with shoppers.

And B&M has owned frozen food chain Heron Foods since 2017.

That said, Heron Foods has been having a woeful time, with its sales down 0.6% in the 52 weeks to 29 March.

B&M’s own struggles are well documented – its UK like-for-like sales fell by 3.1% during the year. And having experimented with a frozen food range in its own stores three or four years ago, it has scaled it back to one chiller in many stores.

A ‘streamlined’ Poundland

Making a success of frozen food in the discount sector means taking on Aldi and Lidl. Chances of success are slight, and it’s not a front to be fighting on when other elements of the core offer need attention.

Poundland plans instead to restore ranges lost during the transition to sourcing products through former parent Pepco Group, in order to provide a greater depth of womenswear in its clothing offer, and return key seasonal general merchandise ranges to their former breadth.

Seasonal GM, such as the Halloween range, were a powerful driver of sales and footfall for Poundland long before its foray onto the turf of supermarkets with frozen food. 

A “streamlined Poundland” will deliver stock to stores from its remaining DCs in Wigan and Harlow.

“It’s sincerely regrettable that this plan includes the closure of stores and distribution centres, but it’s necessary if we’re to achieve our goal of securing the future of thousands of jobs and hundreds of stores,” says Williams.

Poundland is knuckling down on what it knows it can do well – if it can just get the core range right again. And that has to be the best use of the £80m new owner Gordon Brothers has agreed to invest in the turnaround.

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