The Surprising Origin of TV Dinners: Too Many Thanksgiving Turkeys

Necessity is the mother of invention.

 It's been years since I've cooked a whole turkey. Back in the day when I felt obligated to because stores were practically giving them away this time of year, I always looked for the smallest one I could find because I did not want to have turkey leftovers haunting me for days afterwards.

It was just this kind of problem at scale -- think hundreds of tons rather than a mere couple of pounds of excess turkeys --  that led to a new solution in food sales and dinner prep: the frozen TV dinner that was born in 1953.

As per the account that Owen Edwards wrote the Smithsonian Magazine twenty years ago, Swanson's overestimating how many frozen turkeys would be purchased for Thanksgiving that year led to the company finding itself in possession of 10 refrigerated railroad cars stuffed with those bird. That amounted to 260 tons of poultry that needed to be uploaded on a public that had already felt it had done its duty as far as formal carving and feasting. 

Some innovative thinking turned one man's unwanted turkey into a tantalizing offering packaged for convenience. Taking a page from the meals packaged for airlines, Gerry Thomas, a salesman at Swanson, had the birds cooked, carved, and distributed to the accompaniment of  gravy, peas, and sweet potatoes,  among 5,000 aluminum trays.

 An army of women carried out the distribution for these pre-packaged portions that promised other women they could simply pop a tray into the oven (this was before microwaves were a household item) to heat up a meal that would be ready in minutes. The cost was 98 cents.

While that sounds incredibly cheap to us, you have to bear in mind that with the rate of inflation, 98 cents in 1953 had the purchasing power of over $11 in 2024.  Perhaps the steep price is what made them not altogether confident that this TV dinners would sell well. But they did. In fact, in 1954, sales of the turkey dinners hit 10 million, turning the apparent fiasco of 260 tons of excess turkey into a profitable line of business. 

As this was back in the middle of the last century and not in our current one in which every variation on software is hailed as a paradigm-shifting game-changer, Thomas did not declare Swanson frozen dinners to be the future of food. To convey that the convenience of just pulling a box out of the freezer and popping a tray into the oven as revolutionary, he aligned it with the most futuristic technology found in homes at the time -- television. 

Given the popularity of the turkey meal, Swanson expanded its offerings into beef, chicken, etc. The rest, as they say, is history. It was not what we consider fine cuisine these days, but remember that this was also the decade that featured jello in everything from salads to sides to desserts.