How Leftover Turkey Launched The TV Dinner

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Ready for some mindless eating? Pop this tray in front of you and turn on the TV.

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THE PLATE

How Leftover Turkey Launched The TV Dinner

BY REBECCA RUPP

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 26, 2015

IN THE FALL of 1953, the frozen-food company of C.A. Swanson & Sons of Omaha, Nebraska, was left with what must be a record in turkey leftovers: ten railroad cars packed with 520,000 pounds of turkey.

Swanson had massively overestimated the number of birds Americans planned to purchase for Thanksgiving, and so now was stuck shuttling a trainload of spurned turkeys back and forth between the Midwest and the East Coast in order to keep the electricity on in the refrigerated cars, thus keeping the turkeys safely cold.

At its wit’s end, the company put out an all-points bulletin to employees, asking for solutions to the turkey problem. The winner was salesman Gerry Thomas, who proposed that Swanson turn the turkeys into frozen dinners. Thomas suggested that the meals be packaged in a three-compartment aluminum-foil tray—a version of the trays then used to serve in-flight meals on airplanes— and sold as TV Dinners, in colorful boxes designed to look like television sets, complete with screens and tuning and volume knobs.

Swanson couldn’t have hopped on a better bandwagon. Television was the hot technology of the day: While just 9 percent of American homes boasted a TV in 1950, by 1954, 56 percent had televisions and sales would continue to boom. Ten years later, in 1964, 92 percent of American families had a TV.


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[SharonAnn]

1. Turning lemons into lemonade.