Tray cool

We've been on the topic of accidental discoveries lately. I'm sure that it was just an accident, the first time someone dropped a Mento mint into a diet Coke. I mean, no one intentionally would do that, although when I was a youth, dropped salted peanuts into a bottle of Coke was quite the thing to do.

If you'e a kid reading this at home, please ask someone older if it's ok to drop a Mento into a bottle of diet Coke. And then get ready to help them mop it up.

I remember reading that someone came up with the idea of Velcro when walking through a field and finding that burrs stuck to anything loop-shaped. That was the idea behind Velcro!

So today, let's talk about a B.A. mistake. The year is 1953, and it's coming up on Thanksgiving season, and a buyer for the Swanson Frozen Food people has made a slight miscalculation.

(For all I know, this was a group snafu, but every time I hear this story, I always picture one guy at his desk with an adding machine with two yards of tape spilling over his desk, right next to the full ashtray and rotary phone.)

That slight snafu was the purchase of too much turkey for the upcoming holidays. 260 tons too much.

That's 520,000 pounds of turkey, sitting frozen in 10 railroad cars, and the boss is getting frantic.  What to do with all this excess!?

Along came a man named Gerry Thomas, a Swanson salesman who flew all the time. Salesmen can fly, but turkeys cannot.

But Thomas had an idea that soon took wing. He said, "OK, we have a shipload of turkey. Let's go buy a mountain of cornbread stuffing, a river of gravy, enough peas and sweet potatoes to sink the Titanic again, and several million pats of butter to adorn the peas 'n' yams, and 5,000 aluminum trays, sectioned off. Then we'll hire women to work on an assembly line with a spatula in one hand and an ice cream scoop in the other to assemble these components into individual meals.

And we shall call them Frozen TV Dinners!"

And they shall be sold for the reasonable price of 98 cents each.

That was 1953. In 1954, Swanson sold 10 million TV dinners.

Here in 2019, Swanson's share of the $1.2 BILLION frozen dinner business in America is only 10 percent. They were pushed aside by Stouffers, Marie Callender, and others.

I looked it up, and what 98 cents would buy you in 1954 would be worth $9.34 today. Meanwhile, TV dinners hardly cost more than $2 now if you get them on sale, which is how I work it.

Come on over and let's nuke a couple!