When was frozen dinners invented

At first they offered only five different types of meals; however, their menu included foods such as Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes au gratin, beef pot roast, and candied sweet potatoes. They would eventually have as many as 40 different types of frozen dinners, expanding upon the varieties offered by previous manufacturers.

The earlier Maxson dinner, for example, only contained simple items such as ham, applesauce, lima beans, spinach, and hamburger patties.

According to the Practically Edible Encyclopedia , the brothers first started out by distributing the dinners only in the Pittsburgh area and charged customers anywhere from 59 to 89 cents each. Since the brothers were originally from the area, they knew it very well and were able to take advantage of the monopoly that they had with these frozen dinners.

In , they formed a company named Frozen Dinners, Inc. By , they had already sold over , dinners in retail stores in just the Pittsburgh area. On many occasions they could just pull a meal out of the freezer or ice chest, heat it up a little and they would have a meal for their family.

There were a few who were not fond of the new frozen dinners, thinking the meals lacked some variety and flavor. Although it did taste better than the old frozen dinners, consumer tests showed they still were not of the quality of home cooked meals. Although these meals were quite simple in nature, the effect that they had on postwar America was significant. As more women began to enter the workforce, less time was spent on chores such as cooking and cleaning, and more was spent making a living.

Frozen meals became a staple of the American lifestyle because they were great time-savers for those who did not have the time to prepare home-cooked meals anymore. And with the Baby Boom, working families had plenty of mouths to feed but less time to cook.

Frozen dinners were a great way to save families time because wives were spending more time away from home. Predominant methods of slow-freezing meats, poultry and fish typically caused them to lose their flavor and texture while thawing.

By the late s, Birdseye had applied his patented technology to vegetables as well, creating the foundation for the modern American frozen food industry. Few American consumers had iceboxes in their homes. And refrigeration advancements still lagged on the commercial side, with insulated vehicles and sufficiently refrigerated supermarkets still rare.

Worker surveys boxes of Bird's Eye frozen foods as they move along a conveyor belt, c. World War II accelerated the use of frozen meals. In , Maxson Food Systems Inc. Founder W. Maxson planned to expand his company's Strato-Plates to a wider consumer market, but died before the plan took off.

Though inching closer to the American consumer, the dinners remained outside the home. Frozen dinners finally came to the direct consumer market in when brothers Albert and Meyer Bernstein founded Frozen Dinners Inc. By , the company had produced more than , dinners. His heated meal was served in a metal tray.

This was how Swanson would package the extra turkeys: frozen and in trays like the one on the plane. The first few thousand TV dinners were sold in Omaha near Swanson headquarters in After the meal went national, they sold ten million dinners in the first year. In the AP interview, Thomas claimed credit not for the TV dinner itself — the airlines did that first — but for the method of how it was served.

Marketing the product as an easy-to-eat meal in front of the television set, which was then skyrocketing in popularity, and using your lap as a table is what set Swanson apart from the previous frozen meals. For his years of work in the industry and, of course, the TV dinner, Thomas was inducted into the Frozen Food Hall of Fame more on that later.

One of his trays made an appearance in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and his hand prints are cemented into the ground outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

But in , controversy over the real inventor surfaced from a Los Angeles Times article that questioned Thomas's story. Heirs to the Swanson fortune told the newspaper that Thomas made the whole thing up, that he had little or nothing to do with the design of the dinner tray. Carol Swanson Price said her father, Clarke Swanson, and uncle, Gilbert Swanson, who ran the company in the early s, pitched the idea.

Nearly 60 years later, the true inventor remains unknown. One thing we do know: Thomas stuck with his story until he died from cancer in He was The first frozen bagel was born in New Haven, Connecticut, a product that would introduce a convenience for shoppers that would change the American breakfast table for good.

In , Harry Lender and his sons Murray and Marvin began selling traditional Jewish breads and rolls and what would eventually make them famous: bagels. With the efficiency of the Thompson machine it could form bagels an hour , Lender's outgrew the state of Connecticut in bagel production.

Even after they began packaging them in plastic bags in the mid-fifties, the bagels would go stale after a few days. To extend the shelf life of the bagels they were producing in such large quantities, they flash-froze the product before shipping. This, of course, compromised some of the made-from-scratch goodness of the original Lender's bagel, but over time, the company developed recipes for sweeter, softer bagels post freeze.

By the seventies, Lenders bagels could be found in grocers' freezers across the country. The original use of frozen technology was just to keep the bread fresh before delivery.

The night before, they'd defrost the bagels and their recipients were "none the wiser," writes Maria Balinska in her book The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread. Word eventually got out that the "fresh" bagels were yesterday's frozen bread and buyers were angry at first.

But the convenience of the easy-to-grab, frozen breakfast item drowned out initial complaints. But perhaps that was never the main draw. TV dinners had found another niche audience in dieters, who were glad for the built-in portion control. With restaurants closed during Covid, Americans are again snapping up frozen meals, spending nearly 50 percent more on them in April over April , says the American Frozen Food Institute. Specialty stores like Williams Sonoma now stock gourmet TV dinners.

Restaurants from Detroit to Colorado Springs to Los Angeles are offering frozen versions of their dishes for carryout, a practice that some experts predict will continue beyond the pandemic.

To many Americans, the TV dinner tastes like nostalgia; to others, it still tastes like the future.