The Rise and Fall of the TV Dinner - Cheddar Explains

During Thanksgiving 1953, a huge miscalculation was made. The company was Swanson & Sons, a large-scale meat manufacturer. The problem? 260 tons of leftover perishable turkeys. The solution? Freak the heck out. Nobody at the company knew what to do. While they tried to come up with a plan, they stored the 260 tons of turkey on 10 refrigerated railway cars. They shipped those railway cars back and forth from the Midwest to the East Coast in order to keep the electricity on and the freezers sufficiently cold so they didn't waste all that extra food. But of course, this was costly and not at all a permanent fix. This only gave them enough time to come up with a solution to their poultry problem. And a solution wasn't presenting itself. They posted a bulletin asking for ideas from all sectors of the company. No ideas were bad ideas. Famously, Jerry Thomas, a salesman at the company, came up with an incredible solution. Less famously, there's been some debate over who exactly should be credited with the solution, and like most great ideas, it was probably a team effort. But the idea was, follow in the footsteps of the airlines and the military. When you get on a plane, they serve you food on a metal tray, separated out into sections. When soldiers in World War II were serving their time, they would get meal kits called K-rations. These were packaged foods that were considered palatable and valuable in relieving hunger and supplying energy. So the people at Swanson thought, what if we could make delicious pre-packaged frozen meals ready to be heated and served for the everyday American? So they took the excess turkey they had, they plated it with some mashed potatoes and some vegetables, and they sold 10 million dinners in 1954, the first year that they went to market with these. Obviously, they knew they had an immediate hit on their hands. Thus, the TV dinner was born, and it didn't just change the way we ate, it changed the way we operated as a country. As you may have guessed, Swanson wasn't the first company to come up with the idea of selling pre-packaged frozen meals. In fact, the first frozen foods were made by Clarence Birdseye in the 1920s. He figured out that getting food to retain its texture and taste after being thawed out again meant you had to freeze it as quickly as possible. He patented a multi-plate flash freezing machine in 1927 and sold individual frozen foods locally through Birdseye Frosted Food Company by 1930. In 1944, the first frozen dinner meal was created by W.L. Maxenko and called stratoplates. These meals were used on some airlines and sent out to soldiers at war. The company had planned to sell them to the general public, but it ended up never hitting stores due to the death of W.L. Maxenko himself and a seeming lack of interest from the public. These stratoplates were the inspiration for Swanson TV dinners. Some companies have played around with that, but nobody of Swanson's size and scale had really made a concerted effort to bring something like this to market. And most importantly, nobody thought to name their frozen meal product TV dinners before Swanson. As far as most experts agree, this was the secret ingredient to their success. We think of TVs as very commonplace today, but in the early 1950s, it was still a bit of a luxury item. In 1950, only 9% of houses had TVs. By 1954, the same year as the TV dinner boom, it was up to 56%. Gathering in front of the TV was a special occasion and people were doing it every night, frequently with a reheated dinner. By 1964, 92% of households had TVs. Frozen dinners allowed people, specifically women, more free time. In the 1950s, it was commonplace for women to bear the brunt of time-consuming household chores like cleaning and cooking, leaving little time to, you know, get ahead in the workplace or even get a job. But after the TV dinner, women had much more freedom to do the things they wanted while still providing a hot meal for their family. Or as this ad claims, I'm late, but dinner won't be. This wasn't an intention behind the creation of the TV dinner or even the marketing behind it. It was just a matter of the times. In the 1950s, any product that had to do with cooking or cleaning was targeted to housewives. But the impact it had on women's freedom shouldn't be understated. On the negative side, TV dinners also encouraged people to not interact with their family, which was usually done at dinnertime, but instead to sit in front of the TV while eating, a trend that continues today. According to a survey conducted by OnePoll in 2018, 72% of us watch TV while we eat and many say that it's more enjoyable than eating with family or friends. In the same study, it was also found that eating in front of the TV gives way to some unfortunate habits, like being surprised by how much food you snack on and how quickly you consume that food. Television makes us ravenous creatures. Though that hunger for more food was discovered in more recent studies, it seems like this was something that was on the minds of people at Swanson in the 60s and 70s. After frozen meals swept the nation with unforeseen popularity, the brand kept working to improve the product. They unleashed a new line of options, adding dessert to every plate. And expanding the types of food served. New Swanson International Dinners. German. Chinese. Italian. Mexican style. They really drove that point home in 1962 when they dropped the TV part of TV dinners. The company felt like they were limiting people from believing that these frozen meals could be eaten at any time of day. So they rebranded. They also expanded into frozen breakfast. Later, they unveiled The Hungry Man, a double-sized version of their frozen dinners for the people who just couldn't get enough. While we've mostly focused on just one brand of frozen dinners, it's important to note that there were many others. Frozen meals were by no means cornered by Swanson. They were just the brand that did it first. Their explosive popularity led to a saturated market with a lot of brands that you probably know. Like Totino's Pizza Rolls, Lean Cuisine, Banquet, and Stouffer's. From the 80s and onwards, seemingly not much has changed about frozen meals. New brands have cropped up, targeting different audiences, more flavors and flourishes have been added, and there's been a slight focus on making foods healthier. But executives agree that, overall, they've remained relatively unchanged since the 20th century. Which wasn't a problem for them, because frozen meals continued to turn a profit year over year. But this stagnation could be one of the reasons why, since 2008, there's been a steady decline in the market for frozen meals. Some analysts believe it's because frozen meals have gotten pricier. And while convenience is helpful, it's hard for people to pay more for an unchanged and widely believed to be unhealthy product. Whether or not frozen meals actually are healthy isn't as important as the perception that they're not. Especially by young eaters who have been eating them less and less. Older people, however, still gobble them up. That's not to say that the whole industry is on a downward spiral towards death and destruction, because that doesn't seem to be true either. The way we eat just seems to be changing. More frequently, people are looking to frozen foods to make just part of their meal. Like fresh rice and chicken with frozen broccoli cooked in the mix, or frozen strawberries for a smoothie. In this way, they can still be healthy and yet not have to make everything from scratch. So there is still a market for frozen foods. And in fact, frozen meals are starting to pick back up in popularity. In 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that revenue from frozen meals jumped up 5%. This is the first sign of growth in many years. Executives believe that this is due to the fact that companies are really taking strides to update their frozen meals from their dated 80s backdrop to 21st century sustenance. They've also expanded the types of food they offer, working to cater to different dietary restrictions. Frozen meals exploded in popularity in the 1950s. Though people might have fallen out of love with them for a little while, it seems like they're avoiding freezer burn and rising in popularity once again. If you made it this far, thank you so much for checking out this video. Make sure to like and subscribe if you so choose. It really helps us out in creating awesome content like this. If you're looking for more nuance, we've left some links in the description below for the articles that we use when researching this video.