Help in the Kitchen

Since World War II, when servants all but disappeared from the kitchen, a pair of Omaha, Neb. businessmen named W. Clarke and Gilbert C. Swanson have done more than anyone else to take their place. As president and chairman of C. A. Swanson & Sons frozen-food company, the brothers have cut hours from kitchen chores with nine lines of frozen pies, appetizers, meat and poultry dishes, and complete "TV Dinners," each one ready to heat and eat within minutes. The result: a booming $100-million yearly business that is really just starting to grow.

By precleaning turkeys so that they can be shoved into the oven with little work beforehand, the Swansons changed turkey from a Thanksgiving dish to a year-round habit, thereby doubling U.S. turkey-eating. Last week, at their newest $2,000,000 plant at Modesto, Calif., the Swansons were getting into peak production of a new product: a pre-stuffed frozen turkey. In four months production has jumped 50%, to 15,000 birds a day. Last week, by adding a night shift, the Swansons boosted output to 18,000 (about 350,000 Ibs.) daily, and they still cannot catch up with demand.

Leave the Pie Alone. The Swansons have done well in the kitchen because they are cooks themselves and know a cook's problems. Both were taught to cook by their mother, and they still spend hours in their test kitchen trying out new dishes. Before any new product is put on sale, it is passed on by a panel of hotel chefs and a group of 1,200 specially chosen housewives around the nation. After a dish is on the market, buyers flood Swanson headquarters with a thousand letters of advice every day. Wrote one worried New Jerseyite: "I'm afraid you'll get an efficiency expert to change the recipe for your chicken pie. Please leave the pie alone." The Swansons did.

To sell their products, the Swansons also go right to the housewife. Clarke Swanson likes to prowl supermarket food counters, see for himself how housewives shop. Says he: "I watch them pick up a package, drop it, pick up another, look at the picture. Finally, they put something in the basket. Then I ask them why." One thing he found was that the picture on the package was just as important as the price tag. As a result. Swanson packages all have bright, tempting wrappers.

Watch the Fowls Go By. In moving into the kitchen, the Swansons have moved out of the family business founded by their father Carl in 1900. At first, the company supplied bulk frozen foods for other packagers. Later, during World War II, it turned out canned rations for the Army and stepped up its gross from $9,000,000 to $43 million in 1944. But the biggest jump came with peace, when the Swansons noted both the boom in home freezers and the shortage of domestic servants, brought out beef, chicken and turkey pies, new roast beef and fried chicken dinners, all ready for the oven. Their first frozen TV Dinner (sliced turkey on cornbread, buttered peas, sweet potatoes, gravy) now sells at the rate of 13 million a year. Total production: well over 10 million packages a month, from the production lines of plants at Omaha, Modesto, and Salisbury, Md.

The new frozen pre-stuffed turkey costs housewives a few cents a pound more than the unstuffed one, but the Swansons soon hope to sell both birds at the same price, make money on the added weight of the stuffing. Next on the list of possibilities: a corned beef dinner and a ham steak din ner. Says Clarke Swanson: "Our plants are the kitchens of tomorrow. Fifteen years from now 50% of the space in stores will be for frozen foods."

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