Gather around the Television Set: The Birth of the TV Dinner

Author: Allen Butler

In 1953, the company of CA Swanson & Sons had a problem. 520,000 pounds of frozen turkey left unsold at Thanksgiving. Something needed to be done to get rid of all of this meat.

Then came the idea. Using aluminum serving trays similar to those used on airplanes to serve meals, a turkey dinner was created. 

Each course of the dinner would be segmented into its own separate compartment within the tray. The main course of turkey, a separate compartment for mashed potatoes and another for the vegetable. The dinner would be sold complete, and all that anyone had to do would be to put it in the oven, take it out and eat it.

But the inspiration did not end there. Inventor Gerry Thomas realized that we were living in a new modern age. With this new product, a far cry away from the traditional home cooked dinner, he wanted to tap into that modernity. So it was decided to call these new pre-fabricated dinners “TV dinners.” The original packaging for the box the dinner came in was even designed to look like a television set.

Americans loved the TV dinner and bought them in droves. Although only begun with an initial run of 5,000 dinners, by the end of 1954 Swanson had sold a whopping 25 million TV dinners.

Although the name “TV dinner” was only meant to cash in on the growing popularity of television, Americans realized part of the true value of the TV dinner. To take their dinner and gather around the television set, watching their favorite shows like “I Love Lucy” while they enjoyed their warmed up turkey dinner fresh from the oven. It was a new type of meal for a new generation.

In 1954, when the first TV dinner boom came, most Americans still did not own freezers.  Most TV dinners were bought on the same day they were to be cooked, purchased from the grocer and put almost immediately into the oven.

With the popularity of the turkey dinner, Swanson soon came out with new varieties, such as fried chicken and the frozen dinner staple Salisbury steak. Turkey was considered continuously to be the most popular of the TV dinners (and still is to this day).

Swanson stopped calling their frozen meals “TV dinners” in 1962, but the name had already entered into the popular American psyche.  Even today, when no product has marketed as a “TV dinner” in over 40 years, we still refer to frozen dinners prepared in a tray TV dinners.