Television was a sociological phenomenon that fundamentally rewove the fiber of American society in the 1950's and 60's. As archaic as this sounds today, television was a technology breakthrough that changed everything in our cultural ecosystem. Not only would the advertising and entertainment industries never be the same, neither would the interpersonal dynamic of families, thanks to television.
This major shift in the tectonic plates of family social interaction coincidentally collided with an otherwise unrelated occurrence: the overproduction of turkeys. Robert Klara wrote a fascinating article in Adweek last year about how these two seemingly unrelated events changed our culture. In 1954, the team at the C.A. Swanson & Sons food company over-projected the demand for turkeys and found themselves with railcars full of unmarketable frozen fowl. This dilemma came with the unfortunate wrinkle that the only way the refrigerator system worked on those trains was to keep them moving on the rails. Consequently, Swanson had trains traveling back and forth across the country full of frozen turkey, while the company tried to find a solution. But thanks to innovative thinking, those chilly railcars soon turned into hot gravy trains.
According to Klara’s article, a resourceful member of Swanson’s sales team who recently traveled on American Airlines, gained inspiration from the metal tray the flight attendants used to serve his meal. He suggested to Swanson that they create a whole meal around the frozen turkey and provide it to consumers in a metal tray that could be heated in the oven. Here was the big “ah ha” – they could call the frozen meal a TV Dinner to be served while the family was gathered around the television set! The team researched meal ingredients that could be frozen and heated together concurrently with turkey – such as cornbread stuffing, sweet potatoes, green peas, and of course gravy – and the TV Dinner was born. The company sold 25 million of them before the end of the year, based on the Adweek article.
The marketing angle was brilliant because it appealed to the desire for mothers to provide a well-balanced meal they could easily prepare enabling the family to eat together in front of the television. So thanks to Swanson TV dinners, the very busy American family had more quality time to sit down and watch Leave It To Beaver and Gunsmoke together. It's hard to quantify the influence this had the Baby Boomer generation, isn't it?
But this qualifies as a meaningful innovation because it had a lasting impact --beyond the era of conventional ovens and TV trays. Now the frozen meal section at the supermarket consumes a whole aisle, ready to be popped into the microwave. And there is barely a home freezer in America that doesn’t have some modern variation of that original TV Dinner in it, albeit most people are trying to focus on the frozen meal as a healthy offering today.
But here is the real moral of the story. Regardless of the appeal of an innovation, it will not gain traction if it is too expensive, too hard to use or does not solve a fundamental problem for consumers. And the frozen dinner did all of that nicely. So let's give thanks for the folks at Swanson and their innovation on Turkey Day.
And here's hoping that you did not have a frozen TV dinner for Thanksgiving and that you have an abundance of other blessings to fill your gratitude list during the season ahead!
This is an excerpt from Fredda's new book, BoxBreakers! which is available on Amazon.com.