The Birth of the TV Dinner
Surprisingly awesome.
http://www.gourmet.com/food/gourmetlive/2011/101911/the-history-of-the-tv-dinner
According to the most commonly told—although occasionally refuted—version of the story, when C.A. Swanson & Sons, the frozen-food purveyors, vastly overestimated the popularity of Thanksgiving turkey, brothers Gilbert and Clarke Swanson, who ran the company, were left with 260 tons of bird to spare. They had no room to store the excess, so they loaded the nearly half a million pounds of poultry onto ten refrigerated train cars that had to keep moving continuously so the electricity would stay on. Clearly, this wasn’t the most efficient solution. The Swanson brothers challenged their employees to come up with an alternate use for the meat.
While the frozen turkeys rode the rails, Gerry Thomas, a shrewd Swanson & Sons salesman, traveled from his company’s base in Nebraska to the kitchens of Pan American Airways in Pittsburgh. At the time, Pan Am was testing single-compartment foil trays used to serve warm in-flight meals to passengers. Thomas “borrowed” one of the trays (conveniently slipping it into his coat pocket) and spent his return trip drawing up plans for a three-compartment version that would ensure that peas and gravy would never touch each other.
Thomas suggested that the Swansons fill his revamped tray with Thanksgiving dinners. His truly breakthrough idea, however, was in the marketing. He made the trays TV-themed, capitalizing on the latest craze: Americans were hooked on TV, with a set in 33 million households by 1953. The original “TV Brand Frozen Dinner,” as it was called, was packaged in a box designed to look like a TV, complete with volume knobs and the food featured as the screen. The first TV dinner, sold in 1954, cost 98 cents and contained corn bread stuffing, peas, sweet potatoes, and, of course, turkey. (The dessert didn’t appear until 1960, so Mom was still responsible for the sweets.) Swanson initially ordered 5,000 dinners—which were assembled by two dozen women, armed with spatulas and ice cream scoops. By the end of the first full year of production, Swanson had sold ten million TV dinners.
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