Swanson - Other Frozen Dinners

Other Frozen Dinners

When the TV dinner products were launched in the 1950s, they were primarily competing with home-cooked food, and were developed with this relatively low price point in mind. By the 1970s, however, the increasing number of two-income families and single working parents meant that the primary competition came from restaurant food, either eaten at the restaurant or ordered to take out. This allowed the use of more expensive ingredients, but Swanson was slow to make the shift. In addition, American consumers were being increasingly exposed to more authentic international cuisines and fresher flavors, as well as becoming more nutritionally conscious. Swanson was also slow to recognize the importance of the microwave oven in the heat-and-eat food market, and retained foil trays that could not be used in a microwave long after their rivals had adopted paper or plastic trays. Swanson introduced their "Le Menu" line of meals to address all of these concerns, with more sophisticated menus served on undivided plastic microwavable plates with lids. However, these were introduced into a much more competitive market and had trouble competing with more established rivals. By the 1980s, the Swanson's brand trailed other frozen dinner brands such as Stouffer's and their Lean Cuisine products.

Campbell Soup spun off Swanson's TV dinner business with several other brands, including the Vlasic brand of pickles, on March 30, 1998, to a new company called Vlasic Foods International, whose name was changed to Pinnacle Foods in 2001. In the spin-off, Campbell Soup granted Vlasic International/Pinnacle Foods a ten-year license to use the Swanson name on its frozen meals and pot pies. That agreement expired in mid-2009 just before Pinnacle purchased Birds Eye Foods and Pinnacle discontinued the use of the Swanson name in favor of the Hungry-Man brand for its frozen dinners (the Swanson frozen breakfast line had been rebranded Aunt Jemima several years before).

A branch of the Omaha Public Library is named for W. Clarke Swanson.