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. 

The Original Purple Cow

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Cow#/media/File:Burgess-cow.jpg

Did you know that the original purple cow was black?

Ask a marketer about a purple cow, and you likely will elicit a proud reference to Seth Godin, the marketing maven who published Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable in 2003. Based on the premise that you either stand out or remain invisible, Godin's declared that you must aspire to be as different as a purple cow.

But why that animal and that color? He could have said a pink horse or a green dog. Had he written a bit later when billion dollar startups were granted their own mythical animal, he may have even opted for the unicorn. But the thing is that he didn't dream up the image of a purple cow. It was already kicking around for over a century.

A short poem with a long life

Back in 1895 Gelett Burgess published the nonsense poem in The Lark:

I never saw a Purple Cow,

I never hope to see one,

But I can tell you, anyhow,

I'd rather see than be one.

Interestingly, the various texts of the poem capitalize "Purple Cow, and most insert commas as rendered above, though some also put in semi-colons at the end of lines and end the declaration with an exclamation point instead of period.

However, the way it first appeared with this illustration as shown here, you see no punctuation at all, and all the letters were capitalized. You have to possess my kind of curiosity and obsession with the mechanics of writing to take note of these things. 

What would strike most people is the more obviously striking point that the cow in the illustration is not purple -- likely because adding in the color would have rendered printing rather too pricey. ing up this blog, I saw the Purple Cow live!

That is, I saw this copy of a book version that Burgesse put out on exhibit at

the Morgan Library. The explanation on the exhibit says this:

GOING VIRAL IN 1895

I never saw a Purple Cow, / I never hope to see one,
But I can tell you, anyhow, / I’d rather see than be one!

Burgess became famous in 1895 when he published these four lines of verse with an illustration of a cartoonish cow in the first issue of his humor magazine The Lark. Despite the periodical’s modest print run, the poem went viral. Journalists reproduced it across the country and in Europe, sometimes changing the words to suit specific situations (think memes). 

Purple Cow branding

Now recall that the poem declares it's better to see the cow than be it, while Godin declared the opposite. But he wasn't the first one to think of a purple cow as a great visualization for a brand.

Purple Cow ice cream since 1934

As Hank Mejer says in the video above, his father, Fred, loved the poem and decided that it was the name he must use for the ice cream shops within the Mejer stores back in 1960. The Purple Cow Creamery dates back even further to 1934 and lives on in ice cream today.  Alas, those quaint ice cream shops are gone.

From the flight of fancy of a poet in the 19th century and to an enduring brand name for ice cream sold in specialty shops in the 20th century and and a way of visualizing positioning to marketers in the 21st century idea, the purple cow concept certainly has legs. One may even say four of them! 

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