It's was 1953 when Swanson Foods discovered they had 260 tons of turkey meet left after the Thanksgiving holiday. That year, one of their salespeople, Gerry Thomas, had been served the actual first frozen dinner aboard a flight on Pan Am Airlines. That dinner was the invention of William Maxsom, a farmer who had discovered how long foods could be kept frozen when he began freezing crops he overproduced in the 1940s. Maxson discovered they retained most of their flavor when unthawed - even a full year later. Maxsom called his first efforts "Strato-Meals" and sold Pan Am on the process.
When Gerry sampled one of the Straoto-Meals on that flight, he went back to the Swanson brothers with a solution for all that frozen turkey. While Thomas onbviously didn't invent the concept, he did propose one key element which quickly catapaulted Swanson into the forefront of the frozen food frontier. He proposed naming the meals "TV Dinners."
It was marketing genius! Television was rapidly taking over in homes across the American 1950s. The idea of a quick, easy-to-fix dinner that families could eat while remaining glued to the tube was an instant hit. The fact that most of these meals were about as tasty as chewing cardboard didn't matter. A major shift in American cuisine had taken place, just as significant as the McDonald brothers hamburger stand would be a few years later.
And if you are a Baby Boomer, you were there when it happened!
