Nothing quite conveys America's need for quick culinary
convenience, like a TV dinner. Turkey and gravy with mashed potatoes
and peas all neatly portioned in an easy oven ready tray.
The TV dinner of the 1950s and sixties has changed a lot in the decades since.
Today, frozen foods are a booming category in supermarkets.
In 2023, modern home appliances and direct to consumer business
models are picking up where those TV dinners left off.
Technology is always going to be at the forefront
of what drives, I think, a lot of consumer innovation
and balancing that against the very traditional
and very recognizable experience of sharing a kitchen
to both prepare and enjoy a meal
is incredibly important to us, and I don't think that is ever going to go away.
Here's how TV dinners became
a thing to begin with and how they changed American cooking forever
as men were drafted to the front lines of World War II,
new opportunities opened up for women in the workforce.
More people working meant less time to cook.
Add in the rise of the television and you get the TV dinner.
However, the technology that allowed
TV dinners to exist in the first place wasn't the television.
It was the freezer, specifically the flash freezer.
For much of the 20th century, keeping foods fresh relied on slow,
freezing technology which sacrificed taste and texture for preservation.
Before flash freezing foods were frozen very slowly. During the slow freezing
large ice crystals form, which disrupts the cellular structure of the foods.
What this means is that once we thaw the foods, we have lost
a lot of the texture and high quality through that process.
This changed when American inventor Clarence Birdseye
traveled to Canada, where he became intrigued
with the preservation techniques of Inuit fishermen.
As fish were reeled out of the water.
They began to freeze instantly, maintaining the cellular structure within.
Upon his return to the States, Birdseye set out to replicate the flash
freeze strategy of the Inuit at a commercial scale.
By 1925, Birdseye's double built freezer reduced
freeze times from days to minutes, enabling the mass production of flash
frozen meats, fruits and vegetables.
Maxom Food Systems, adopted Birdseye's technology
methods in 1945 for their 'Strato-Plates'.
Ready made frozen meals designed to be sold on airlines.
In 1953, a grave miscalculation.
Over Thanksgiving, Turkey quantities left the Swanson Company with 260
tons of turkey sitting in ten train cars. While Swanson kept the meat refrigerated
by running the train back and forth between the East Coast and the Midwest.
They searched desperately for a better solution.
Appetizing meals are served to all on board.
Borrowing from the concept of the 'Strato-Plate',
Swanson salesman Gerry Thomas pitched an idea - preserve the turkey
through flash freezing and sell it to consumers as a meal in a box.
Voila. The TV dinner was born.
However, Turkey
alone wasn't much of a meal for Swanson to include sides with their dinner entree
they needed to solve the problem of cook times.
Synchronization as a concept in cooking of these multi-component meals
that lets us have all of the food cooked
to the proper temperature within the same time period.
A lot of this work was done back in the 1950s
by Betty Cronin, who was a bacteriologist at Swanson.
So what she did was experimentation with different types of foods
and seeing how you can cook them before adding them to the package
so that once you put them in the oven and have them cook
for the same time, they would all come out at the right temperature.
Swanson's TV dinner became an immediate success, selling over
10 million TV dinner trays in the first year of production.
As its name indicates, the success of TV dinners
ran parallel with the rise in household televisions.
In 1950, only 9% of U.S.
households owned television sets.
But by 1955, the number rose to 64%
and again to 87% by 1960.
TV dinners were lauded for their speedy cook times of 25 minutes
a time that shrunk drastically with the advent of the microwave oven.
Introducing a new era in convenient cooking.
Campbells bought the Swanson TV dinner business.
There were other competitors, but Swanson was the biggest.
So we had the sales infrastructure.
We had the operational infrastructure.
What we had was a product that was starting to become a bit out of date
because people were wanting even more convenience, higher quality,
you know, microwavable.
So we just needed to be creative about how we did it.
They had had
an idea to do a more upscale frozen dinner,
and we came up with 'Le Menu' frozen dinners.
The candlelight, the music, the flowers, Le Menu.
The trick to the business at the time that we had to address
was to make the product duel-ovenable because at the time household penetration
was of microwaves was maybe 20%, but we knew it was coming.
So we wanted to make the product microwavable, but we had to address
the immediate issue that most households didn't have a microwave yet.
At a height of five feet, a weight of 750 pounds, and a cost of about $5,000,
the first microwave didn't resemble what we know today.
It would take decades before the technology became a kitchen staple.
The first domestic microwave oven came about in 1967
at a price point of $495.
By 1970, nearly 40,000 units were sold in the U.S..
Five years later, annual sales reached 1 million. As brands like
Campbell's, Pillsbury and Nestlé geared more products towards microwave cooking,
the device's popularity flourished.
By 1986, products designed for the microwave
had grown to be a $269 million a year business.
With the microwave becoming a fixture in over 80%
of American households by 1993.
Convenience foods are always going to be important for the consumer.
People are busier than ever. In the days when we launched these products,
particularly when it became microwavable, 5 minutes instead of a half an hour
and better quality food,
was amazingly an opportunity for people to enjoy this product.
Convenience is still a huge opportunity, huge need, just different ways
of addressing it.
Since the turn of the century, microwave
sales have staggered, while frozen food sales have exploded.
Frozen foods were among the fastest growing grocery category during the
COVID-19 pandemic, bringing in $72.2 billion in retail
sales in 2022 nearly a 34% increase compared to 2019.
Along with growing demand for frozen foods,
the emergence and uptake of new products like meal kits highlight
a shifting appetite in America towards other forms of convenient cooking.
Blue Apron is one of the original meal kit companies in the United States.
We've been around since 2012 and we ship boxes of delicious
fresh food items to people's homes to prepare for them and their families.
As with the television and the microwave,
technology has a hand in shaping consumer interests.
If you look at all of the technological innovation,
again, going back to Swanson turkey dinners, up to the creation of meal kits
There's been a huge move towards faster and easier cooking
but what had not yet been solved was an opportunity to have
all of those experiences exist but still have culinary discovery
as a part of it and still have ingredient quality
and wellness and health at the forefront of those considerations.
Home dining continues to be an evolving picture.
While meal kits cut down on time at the store, new pathways to convenience
are being forged with technology like smart kitchens and air fryers.
One of the biggest things for us has been making sure that we have
a supply chain that can actually meet where customers interests are.
And really their interests have coalesced around three things:
quality, convenience and variety.
Demand for variety has only increased
as the media landscape around food has continued to broaden.
That doesn't mean that every TikTok trend turns itself into a Blue Apron recipe,
but it does mean that if we see techniques that people are responding to on TikTok,
we might find a way to incorporate them into our recipes.
Still putting all of our Blue Apron signatures and approaches to the recipe,
but understanding that there are now different authorities that people
are turning to for food content and really for inspiration,
that we want to be able to engage with and stay relevant
in conversation.