Haley Thompson- TV Dinner!

“No pots or pans, no serving dishes, a plate which you throw away when you are finished. This is a housewife’s dream.”
Food: America’s Biggest Business, 1959





Recently I've been reading about food in the 50’s in Something from the Oven by Laura Shapiro, specifically TV dinners and frozen foods. I thought I’d just sum up some of the facts and marketing strategies geared towards housewives that I’ve found.

It was basically a race for companies to come up with the best strategies for quick meals after frozen food became more popular during the war. Orange Juice from concentrate and fish sticks were some of the first market winners. Variations on fish sticks such as ham and veal sticks were never quite as successful.

The ultimate landmark in the frozen food industry came in 1952, soon after the introduction of larger, suburban home freezers…the fully frozen meal. The compartmentalized dinners were introduced to the market around 52 and were met with success, but it was in 1954 when Swanson put out their first segmented dinner that they went from novel to staple. The success for Swanson’s had less to do with better taste or higher quality, and more to do with an already well established name, million dollar marketing budget and the introduction of the title TV dinner.

“The flavor of Swanson’s dinners- entrancingly metallic, as if tray and turkey were one- clings to the palate memory of anyone who encountered those magic meals in childhood.” (Shapiro, 19)

For my future posts I’m going to do more write-ups on the food situation in the 50’s concerning marketing towards the housewife with a focus on Poppy Cannon who capitalized on creating recipes using primarily canned and frozen food.

P.S. How do you add pictures?

(edited by Summer to include the picture. You can add photos in one of two ways. I'll show you how at the discussion group tonight.)