No one in their right
mind would plan to have half a million pounds of turkey leftovers.
But that's what happened to C. W. Swanson and Sons and the result
was an American icon.
The company had badly overestimated the demand for its turkey
products and wound up with 520,000 pounds of unsold turkeys. The
company didn't have enough warehouse space for all of them. So
they loaded them into refrigerated rail cars.
The cars had to keep moving to keep the turkeys frozen. And that
meant that the company was racking up big time railway charges
every day as the cars shuttled back and forth across the country.
So now the problem wasn't just big, it was getting bigger every
day.
Brothers Gilbert and Clark Swanson were managing the company
and they asked the folks who worked at Swanson for help. It's
a pretty good bet that if you involve lots of people in coming
up with ideas, at least one of them will come up with something
good.
In this case, the good idea came from a fellow named Gerry Thomas.
At the time, Thomas was working as a salesperson for Swanson and
making the princely sum of $200 a month.
As Thomas tells the story, he was in Pittsburgh on a sales trip
when a distributor showed him a metal tray that Pan American Airlines
was experimenting with. The airline was looking for a way to serve
warm food on its long, overseas flights. Until then, sandwiches
had been the only solid food option.
Thomas thought that Swanson could use a tray to create a product
that was actually a pre-prepared meal. On the plane back to Swanson's
Omaha headquarters he "did some noodling" and refined the concept.
He decided that the tray should have three compartments instead
of one. "I spent five years in the service," he said, "So I knew
what a mess kit was. You could never tell what you were eating
because it was all mixed together."
Thomas didn't stop with the tray. He also designed the packaging
(a box that looked like a TV set complete with painted on knobs)
and suggested the name "TV Dinner." He reasoned that TV was the
hot topic of the day, something folks were talking about. Today
he might have designed a box that looked like a computer and called
it a "PC Dinner."
The company was willing to try Thomas' idea, but there were technical
problems to be solved. The food had to be prepared properly so
that, later, when it was heated up, everything would be ready
at the same time.
They also wanted to test the market. Other companies had tried
something like this already with names like "Frigi-Dinner" and
"One-Eye Eskimo." Swanson's didn't conduct a survey. They just
prepared an initial run of 5000 meals and sat back to see what
would happen.
What happened was that Swanson's sold 10 million TV Dinners in
the first year. Sales climbed the next year and the year after
that. But TV Dinners turned out to be more than just a hot new
product.
TV Dinners became the prototype for a whole class of food. The
industry calls them "home replacement meals." Today, Americans
spend more than $100 billion a year on them.
TV Dinners also became a cultural icon. Products were designed
to help you use them easily.
Some were simple and logical. "TV trays" were simple folding
trays that could hold your TV Dinner while you hunched forward
watching the tube. Then there was a slipcover for your food freezer
so you could keep it in the living room. There's no record of
whether there was a slipcover for a living-room-based oven.
People loved the three-compartment metal tray. In 1986 the Smithsonian
added one to its permanent collection, even though Swanson had
replaced the metal tray with plastic so that the TV Dinners, now
called "Frozen Dinners" could be heated up in the microwave.
For coming up with the TV Dinner idea and marketing materials,
Gerry Thomas got a raise, to $300 per month, and a bonus of $1000.
He rose to Marketing Manager for Swanson, before retiring and
moving to Arizona.
Thomas also became a bit of an icon himself. In 1997 he had his
handprints immortalized in cement outside Grauman's Chinese Theater
in Hollywood, along with the imprint of the aluminum tray he designed.
Not bad for coming up with the solution to ten boxcars full of
leftovers.
Top of page
Swanson's is
now owned by Pinnacle Foods. It's share of the frozen dinner market
in the US is tiny, but that doesn't mean it isn't proud of the TV
Dinner. Here is the
official site for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Invention of the
TV Dinner.
The American
Frozen Food Institute's history of frozen food.
The National
Frozen & Refrigerated Foods Association history of frozen foods.
This is also the organization that runs the Frozen Food Hall of
Fame.
Grauman's
Chinese Theater
Something
From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura
Shapiro. In this delightfully surprising history, Laura Shapiro,
author of the classic Perfection Salad, recounts the prepackaged
dreams that bombarded American kitchens during the fifties. Faced
with convincing homemakers that foxhole food could make it in
the dining room, the food industry put forth the marketing notion
that cooking was hard; opening cans, on the other hand, wasn't.
30 November 2004
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