The Real Inventor of the TV Dinner
When something proves successful it has many parents which explains the competing claims to inventing the TV dinner. One has been repeated so frequently and by so many it has become generally accepted. The story involves train cars of frozen turkey meat crisscrossing America. According to lore, C.A. Swanson & Sons was left with a half a million pounds of turkey that failed to sell over the Thanksgiving holiday. If this surplus spoiled, it represented a significant loss for the business. Anxious executives reached out to employees imploring them to find a way to move the meat.
Meanwhile, the turkeys purportedly toured the country in refrigerated railcars. The story goes that rather than let the turkeys thaw and spoil, the company paid a railway company to keep them cold. This has been a fine fiction but does not hold up to scrutiny. A documentary in 2023 from CNBC and ongoing, countless articles mistakenly reinforce this tale.
The narrative grows more absurd with a Swanson sales representative’s unchecked embellishments. Gerry Thomas asserted until his death that he single-handedly masterminded nearly every aspect of the TV dinner. Thomas admits taking inspiration from airline meals served in segmented trays. He borrowed the idea but then completely redesigned it for freezing, shipping, and reheating. This bon vivant told anyone who would listen that the Swanson turkey dinner side dishes were his creations including a recipe from his mother.
Thomas took credit for creating the trademark name “TV dinner” and designing the original boxes to look like a TV set. This account, while entertaining, has been disputed by the Swanson family, former company employees, and nearly everyone else. The truth has been confused and elusive. It has not helped that the Swanson company issued at least three different official accounts.
This article continues and is an excerpt from the pop culture and food history bestseller — TV DINNERS: THE HOT HISTORY OF FROZEN MEALS.
Swanson family members grew irritated by impostors. Carol Swanson Price, whose father, Clarke Swanson, and uncle, Gilbert Swanson, ran the company when TV dinners launched had this to say, “This has been a source of annoyance to me over the years because I have seen a lot of people claim credit. I’d like to set the record straight.” She took aim at Thomas, but it was difficult to shoot him down given he was inducted into the Frozen Food Hall of Fame and his account continues to be recycled in the media.
The Los Angeles Times investigated Thomas’ story and found glaring inconsistencies and falsehoods. Weeks after the man passed away in 2005 it reported, “Gerry Thomas, who died July 18, regaled reporters with tales of refrigerated railcars crisscrossing the nation, carrying 520,000 pounds of surplus turkey.” The article was titled, False Tales of Turkeys on a Tray. Apparently, Thomas had convinced himself of his brilliance. In his telling and retelling, it was said to be an unusually hot Thanksgiving, so the heat reduced demand for turkey. The Los Angeles Times checked the weather for that year and found it to be one of the coldest autumns on record. Even so, warm weather would not deter Americans from devouring turkey, stuffing, and gravy on the country’s most popular holiday. The newspaper also discovered Swanson had ample available cold storage, there was no need for the turkeys to travel aimlessly by rail.
Thomas made his career in sales. A profession that calls for being a storyteller, not necessarily a truth-teller. His assertions were frequently challenged and when cornered, Thomas would call his story a metaphor, not a factual account. Upon his death, The New York Times printed two corrections to the original obituary. The first read, “An obituary on July 21 about Gerry Thomas, a food industry executive credited with having designed and named the TV dinner, referred incompletely to its origins. Although Mr. Thomas, as a sales and marketing specialist for C.A. Swanson & Sons, was widely reported to have had the inspiration, there have been competing claims, including one from the Swanson family that W. Clarke Swanson, an owner of the company in the 1950’s, had the idea.”
The second correction addressed Mr. Thomas’ handprints being added to the Walk of Fame in Hollywood, “The obituary also referred erroneously to the occasion on which Mr. Thomas’s handprint was put on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood in 1999. It was a Swanson’s publicity event, not a permanent installation; the concrete slab was then sent to the company headquarters for display.” Regardless of his memory and honesty, frozen dinners existed before Swanson so there was no way Thomas was the inventor nor driver of the company’s product.
Betty Cronin, a Swanson employee, played a significant part. On the 35th and 40th anniversaries of the product, she was touted as, “the mother of the TV dinner.”[i]. This prompted media to credit Cronin as the brains which further confused the origin story. To her credit, she tried to set the record state. Cronin acknowledged Gilbert and Clarke Swanson as the inventors while the company’s advertising staff were responsible for the name and packaging. She was blunt, “Gerry Thomas had nothing to do with the TV dinner.”
Clarke Swanson Jr. agrees with Cronin, “I never had heard of Gerry Thomas. Neither had my sister, Carol Swanson Price, nor my aunt, Gretchen Swanson Velde. Gerry Thomas may or may not have been involved in developing the TV dinner as a part of the marketing team, but any claim that he is solely responsible for naming the TV dinner and developing that product is, in my opinion, quite dubious.”[ii] Robert G. Phipps’ book, The Swanson Story, supports Gilbert and Clarke as the fathers of the product, “Both men were aware of the many earlier attempts to market a frozen dinner but were not impressed.”
If this isn’t already confusing, a Mad-Men era marketing guru is another contender. M. Crawford Pollock had previously helped DuPont and Green Giant sell more products. He went on to become Swanson’s Vice President of Marketing. Frozen Food Age, a trade magazine, believed Pollock was firmly behind Swanson’s new product.[iii] He was quoted in an article predicting that married women in salaried careers would be the primary purchasers of frozen meals. Clarke Swanson Jr. did his best to clarify, “So far as I can recall, the marketing concept and the product name ‘TV Dinner’ came out of a team that included my father, my uncle and Crawford Pollock. The actual development of the product was done by Betty Cronin and a Swiss chef who was a friend of my family.”[iv]
The truth is simple. Products are conceived by many minds and touched by many hands. Most new products fail to credit the right people. Employees are rarely individually recognized as the glory goes to the company. Sometimes a ground-breaking idea is not enough. A brilliant notion can slouch along until an innovator with a nose for the entrepreneurial realizes its potential, perfects its contours, and gives it mass appeal. For cars, it was Henry Ford. For computers, it was Steve Jobs. For frozen meals it was Gilbert and Clarke Swanson who identified a market opportunity and improved on what already existed.
Along the way, several employees and supporting businesses shaped the TV dinner. In fact, the inspiration of turning the product’s box into a television console came from Tatham-Laird, Swanson’s advertising agency. If you think about the surplus turkey tale, it is not feasible to have tons of meat crafted into meals in new trays and packaging and distributed and sold within weeks. It makes more sense the company had begun working on the product years before launch. Time would be needed to work out all the kinks.
No frozen meal brand was as quickly and widely successful as Swanson. The Swanson TV Brand Dinner debut took place with little fanfare on September 10, 1953. An encouraging five thousand units sold in three months proving Gilbert and Clarke Swanson were onto something. The company ramped up production and launched an extensive national marketing campaign. Within Swanson, it was known under the aggressive codename, “Operation Smash”. In 1954, Swanson cooked, froze, and sold over ten million dinners, a staggering number, and an amazing sales increase. The next year defied all expectations. Swanson sold twenty-five million dinners mostly of the turkey variety. Having once feared only the Thanksgiving holiday, turkeys had reason to tremble all year long.
[i] Rivenburg, Roy, A landmark idea, yes, but whose?, Los Angeles Times, November 23, 2003
[ii] Rivenburg, Roy, A landmark idea, yes, but whose?, Los Angeles Times, November 23, 2003
[iii] Rivenburg, Roy, A landmark idea, yes, but whose?, Los Angeles Times, November 23, 2003
[iv] Rivenburg, Roy, A landmark idea, yes, but whose?, Los Angeles Times, November 23, 2003
