How did cauliflower and extra turkey lead to a booming culinary empire?
And which famous TV dinner's portion size may have led to more booming waistbands?
There's a small town legend that you should always lock your car doors in the summertime so no one
will put a bag of zucchini on your front seat. If you garden, you know surplus can be a problem .
Way back in the 1940s, a guy named William Maxson had that problem with cauliflower.
But he had some room in his freezer, so he cooked the cauliflower, stashed it,
and left it to languish for a whole year until he finally remembered it existed. He took some out,
tried a bite, and did not toss the whole thing into the bin in disgust. The frozen meal was born.
After that lightbulb experience, Maxson started experimenting with freezing all different kinds
of food, which he would stash in his freezer and then serve to unsuspecting dinner guests.
Frozen meals may seem like an obvious fit for the overworked,
unpaid American housewife of the 1940s, but that was not the first market that occurred
to William Maxson. He was a Navy man, and his thoughts immediately went to all those
poor sailors on Naval Air Transport who had to eat mystery rations and cold sandwiches.
Maxson designed a meal for the airborne Navy that looked remarkably similar to the ones
you can pick up in the frozen section today, except somewhat more basic. These early frozen
dinners were reportedly called "Sky Plates." The soldiers had six options to choose from,
including ham steak, meatloaf stew, frankfurters with beans, and veal cutlet.
At the end of World War II, there weren't as many Navy men flying around on air transport,
but commercial air travel was becoming more of a thing. It wasn't a huge leap for Maxson to switch
from the military market to the commercial market, and he didn't really need to change anything about
his Sky Plates, either. By 1947, Pan Am was trying out Sky Plates on a few select flights,
and the future was looking bright for Maxson and his frozen meal empire.
Smithsonian says he was even planning to market his frozen meals to home cooks,
but he died before he had a chance to make that part of his frozen dreams come true.
"What would he like for dinner?"
Shortly after Maxson's death, an entrepreneur named Jack Fisher invented the "Fridgi-Dinner,"
which was pretty much the same thing as a Sky Plate except it wasn't airborne and the people
who ate it were usually drunk. Fridgi-Dinner's target audience was bar and tavern owners,
who were forever trying to find something else to feed their patrons besides peanuts.
Meanwhile, other companies were trying the idea out in smaller markets. In 1949,
the Bernstein brothers launched Frozen Dinners Inc. in Pittsburgh, which sold
"One-Eyed Eskimo" dinners exclusively to locals. By 1954, One-Eyed Eskimo frozen
meals were sold all over the eastern United States. The frozen meal was on its way up.
The story of how Swanson claims to have invented the frozen dinner is actually eerily reminiscent
of the story of how Maxson himself actually developed it. It all started with a surplus,
but in Swanson's case it was a huge, potentially expensive surplus. In the weeks after Thanksgiving
in 1952 — you know, when the whole country is sick of the sight of turkey — the company found itself
with 260 tons of uneaten Thanksgiving poultry. To buy itself a little time,
Swanson loaded all those surplus turkeys onto a refrigerated train, which did not work as a
refrigerator unless it was moving. To keep the turkeys from spoiling, the train had to go on
a long back and forth trip while executives tried to figure out how to solve their 260-ton problem.
That's when a Swanson employee hit upon the idea of packaging the turkey up with gravy,
cornbread stuffing, sweet potatoes, and peas and selling it as individually portioned frozen meals.
Okay, so why the name TV dinner then? Well, coincidentally, Swanson's idea coincided with
the invention of the TV tray, which also happened to coincide with the decline of the family meal.
You see, 1953 was just after the dawn of the television set, and a lot of families were
abandoning boring family dinner conversation in favor of Dragnet and I Love Lucy. After all, there
was no such thing as a DVR, so if you weren't sitting in front of the tube when your favorite
show aired, you'd miss it. This impossible problem necessitated the invention of the TV tray.
The problem with 1950s dining in front of the TV was that someone still had to cook
and someone had to wash the dishes afterwards, jobs that generally fell to women. And then the
TV dining experience wasn't as much fun for the wife. So Swanson decided to brand
its frozen meals as TV Dinners, featuring minimal prep and cleanup so everyone can
take part. It even designed a cute box shaped like a television screen to make it clear to
everyone exactly what you were supposed to be doing while you ate those dinners.
"Yes, time's up! Go call daddy!"
Before Swanson, the frozen ready-to-eat meal was the domain of the entrepreneur. Unfortunately
for all those up-and-coming entrepreneurs, Swanson was a big name with a lot of money,
and money often trumps ingenuity. Swanson's frozen TV dinners were cleverly packaged,
priced at an affordable 98 cents, and available in grocery stores all over the nation. In the
first full year of sales, Swanson sold 10 million frozen dinners. The year after that
it sold 25 million of them, edging out much of the competition. Swanson wasn't
totally without rivals, though — Stouffer's and Banquet also wanted a piece of the pie.
Stouffer's was once an Ohio restaurant chain, but it also sold frozen starters
to people in too much of a hurry to cook from scratch or come in for a sit-down meal,
and it developed its own line of frozen meals around the same time as Swanson. Banquet,
which began its business with frozen meat pies, introduced its own line of frozen dinners in 1954.
If you ate frozen meals as a kid, your memories of the dessert compartment
are almost certainly more vivid than your memories of the peas and carrots.
But the dessert compartment, which often featured brownies or cherry pie, was not
always a feature of the TV dinner. In fact, it didn't even make its first appearance until 1960.
The dessert compartment was introduced after Campbell's Soup Company took over Swanson's
frozen meal line, keeping only the name. Campbell's was also responsible for branching
out of the dinner sector into the breakfast sector with the 1969 launch of Great Starts.
By today's standards, the portion sizes of Swanson's original TV dinners were but a microcosm
of what humans need to survive in modern America. As early as 1973, Campbell's realized that men
didn't want to eat like rabbits; they wanted big, high-calorie meals that would keep them satisfied.
The new "Hungry-Man" line of frozen dinners featured larger portions, lots and lots of meat,
and had a celebrity-fueled marketing campaign featuring NFL stars "Mean" Joe Greene and
Rocky Bleier of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who were featured in several commercials for the
line. It's unclear just how many calories were in the original Hungry-Man meals,
but it's thought that they contained around 4,000 calories, nearly double what even the
hungriest man — perhaps even an NFL player — is supposed to eat in an entire day.
"Now I know what a TV dinner feels like."
Up until the 1980s, TV dinners were really just about convenience. If you were in a hurry
or you were too tired to cook, you popped a TV dinner into the oven and you didn't really worry
too much about how ordinary it was, because it was just an easy way to fill your stomach. Then,
in the 1980s, the concept of the foodie was born. Suddenly, people cared about food in
ways they had never before cared about food. They didn't just want to fill their stomachs,
they wanted to fill their stomachs with something extraordinary. Naturally, the frozen food industry
saw this as a dire problem, but Campbell's thought they had the answer: Le Menu.
"I'd like to propose a toast— to dinner."
With the Le Menu line of frozen TV dinners, instead of eating chicken nuggets or Salisbury
steak, you could enjoy finer cuisine, and just as quickly. That strategy worked,
too. Consumers returned to the frozen foods aisle, sales got a boost, and the TV dinner lived on.
Adults of the 1990s wanted to eat healthy,
but anyone who's ever raised a kid or two understands that most would rather starve
to death than eat a piece of broccoli. If you really want your kids to eat enthusiastically,
sometimes you have to offer food that is either deep fried or smothered in melted cheese.
This may be why Kid Cuisine was such a hit when it debuted in the 1990. Around this time,
single income families were becoming less common, and moms had a lot less time to spend whipping up
a wholesome lunchtime meal or even a wholesome dinner. Busy parents needed a fast and efficient
way to feed their children, and Kid Cuisine was the answer. The frozen meals featured kid-friendly
flavors like chicken nuggets and hamburger pizza in a convenient microwaveable tray.
"Take me to your nugget eater."
By the 1990s, people were starting to realize that what you eat has a lot to do with how healthy you
are. Doctors already knew that, of course, but regular people were finally acting on the advice
medical experts had been giving them for decades. This was the era of the low-fat and fat-free
diets, which saw people rejecting frozen chicken nuggets in favor of foods made with fresher,
healthier ingredients. Even today around 40% of American consumers think frozen foods aren't
nutritious, no matter how many servings of vegetables there are. In 1998, the FDA tried
settling this debate when it published research that found no difference between the nutritional
value of fresh foods and frozen foods, but that hasn't stopped people from believing otherwise.
"I'm thin! I'm thin! Look at my cheekbones!"
It wasn't just a desire to eat healthier foods that fueled the slow rejection of the frozen
dinner. It's also not especially cost-effective anymore to eat ready-made frozen meals, so why pay
more money for presumably less healthy food? By 2008, frozen dinner sales were in decline and the
frozen food aisle started to shrink, which left manufacturers scrambling to find a new strategy.
From its humble origins featuring excess cauliflower and too many turkeys to the
frozen food aisles of today, the frozen TV dinner has come a long way. But sadly,
Swanson's part in modern, frozen cuisine is but a fraction of what it once was. Today
the Hungry-Man line of frozen meals is the only thing left of the original Swanson TV
dinners, and the name doesn't even appear on the packaging anymore.
That's partly because the brand has changed hands so many times. In 1998,
Campbell's spun off its Swanson TV dinners line into a new company that would eventually
become Pinnacle Foods. However, the business struggled for a decade until it was acquired
by conglomerate Conagra Brands in 2018. Today, Conagra still owns Hungry-Man,
which is still trying to appeal to hungry people everywhere, but in a much less calorie-heavy way.
Modern Hungry-Man meals typically have less than 1,000 calories, which can still be pretty hefty,
but not quite as artery-clogging as the Hungry-Man meals of the past.
Billions of lives were turned upside down during the COVID-19 pandemic, but there were
a few positive outcomes, especially from certain business perspectives. Namely, the frozen dinner
market got a major boost while everyone was in lockdown. Stuck at home, unable to have dinner
parties, and hard pressed to find staples like potatoes and rice in the picked-over local grocery
store, our eating habits changed and consumers started opting for frozen ready-made meals more
often. Why waste time in the kitchen when the only people you're feeding are yourself and
your Boston terrier? Thanks to that COVID-fueled boost, today's frozen TV dinner market is worth
about $41 billion. Analysts think it may be worth as much as $130 billion by 2029, though
it's unclear what experts think will be driving that — let's just hope it's not another lockdown.