Amanda

TV dinners have change over time. In 1944 they stared adding frozen fruits and vegetables.  When Quaker came out with TV dinners they were served on aluminum trays. When they first came out you could choose from four different meats Salisbury steak, meatloaf, fried chicken, or turkey. For sides you could get mashed potatoes, carrots, or green beans. Not long after you could get a dessert that comes with it. When they first came out they were .98 cents each. Now a days TV dinners come with more options. You have more entrees and desserts to choose from. Also they replaced the aluminum trays with plastic trays. Over the years other brands started to do TV dinners. Some brands use TV dinners to distribute their food. Some of these brands will also use it as diet food. By freezing the dinners it makes it easier to transport food over long distances. There are many different types of TV dinners. There are different types of pasta and Italian dishes to choose from. You can get then in different styles and flavors. They also have different meat, vegetables, and seafood dinners to choose from. They have added more modern flavors to these dinners also. Also they have low calories alternatives. This is for people who want to lose or maintain weight. Not all TV dinners are good for you, most of them contain more calories than you should consume in one day. They also have non-frozen dinners. This is like steamer rice, noodle bowls and microwavable soups.

Work Cited

                               Flapjack. “ The History of the TV Dinner.” itthing.com.

                                         It thing. 7 Jan. 2011. Web.  10 April 2012.

                          Pachucki, Debra. “ Different Kinds of TV Dinners.” ehow.com.

                                   eHow food. 10 Oct. 2011. Web.  10 April 2012

andrew's paragraph

The different companies that made TV dinners when they first came out were Birdseye, Swanson, Maxson, and Banquet (Pachucki). Today, there are so many different types of TV dinners. A couple of them include Lean Cuisine, Smart One, and Schwan’s. The different kinds of meals these companies make are meat, vegetable, pasta, seafood, and low calorie meals. The companies that make the TV dinners have made the grocery market an average of $4.5 billion a year in sales (“TV Dinner”). That number continues to grow today. In the future, the companies want to improve on making these meals through quality, speeding up the creation, and increase the sales in the grocery market (“TV Dinner”). They also want to solve problems with microwave heating.


Work Cited
Pachucki, Debra. “Different Kinds of TV Dinners.” ehow.com
eHow food. 10 Oct. 2011. Web. 10 Apr. 2012

"TV Dinner." How Products Are Made. Encylopedia.com
2000. April 10, 2012

First Paragraph (advertising) Blake

         The idea of the T.V. dinner and how it was and is advertised has not changed much until recently. Early advertising had more to do with how the package looked and not mass media. The genius in the advertising was to link the dinners with the latest craze of the day, TELEVISION! The package would resemble a T.V. right down to the knobs.The individual compartments would get most people excited about this new dinner. Betty Fussell an author said "The segmented plate was enormously powerful and The childlike packaging makes it appealing. The food is segmented, just the way we separated  food on our plates when we we're children, it's a form of comfort to us. Everything is in it's place"(qtd. in Lebeau ).  But the country's more demanding palate and corporate indifference have turned this piece of Americana into little more than a subject of wistful nostalgia (qtd. in Lauro ). By the turn of the next century sales had dramatically decreased and Swanson was bought by Pinnacle Food Corporation in 2001. With the company bankrupt a new ad campaign was put together to get the attention of the aging baby boomers and their kids. The ten million dollar ad campaign was hoping to boost poor revenue sales .Ms. Jacobs said "in the last 10 years all the big players in frozen food, from ConAgra to Nestlé, have invested heavily in product quality"(qtd. in Lauro ).    The idea of making the taste of the food was high on the list of things that were to be advertised.  Emily Eisnitz management director for Foote , Cone & Belding in New York,  said "Pinnacle has invested $10 million in product improvements for the Swanson dinners and has added trendy new dinners like Mesquite Chicken with Santa Fe Rice and Beans".(qtd. in Lauro ) They also started using brand names like Tyson . The initial commercial has a well dressed beautiful rich women. She is walking around her mansion and ends up leaning over the railing of her grand staircase. The next scene shows her open the T.V. dinner and breathing in the new delicious food and to top it all off she likes her tray clean in the end. The voice over says even though Swanson is now chic , T.V. dinner etiquette still applies. This advertising method is not being well received by critics, consulting groups, or professor's of business. The seventy percent of dinners are being  prepared by women and Pinnacle is hoping by making dinner a little more simple they can lure them back to the T.V. dinner side.


                                                         Works Cited

 Lauro, Patricia Winters. "The Media Business: Advertising; A $10 million campaign for Swanson focuses on the new, fashionable TV dinner." NYTIMES.com. The New York Times. 30 Oct. 2002. Web. 06 Apr. 2021.

 Lebeau, Mary Dixon. "At 50, TV dinner is still cookin'." The CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR 10 Nov. 2004. Web. 06 Apr. 2012

                                 At 50, TV Dinner is Still Cooking