NYT -- Gerry Thomas, Who Thought Up the TV Dinner, Is Dead at 83 ................................
July 21, 2005
Gerry Thomas, Who Thought Up the TV Dinner, Is Dead at 83
By LOUISE STORY
Gerry Thomas, who designed clever packaging for a frozen meal and called it the TV dinner, died on Monday in Phoenix, Ariz. He was 83.
The cause was cancer, his wife, Susan Mills Thomas, said.
In the early 1950's, Mr. Thomas was a salesman for C. A. Swanson & Sons, a frozen food company in Omaha. The company found itself one year with an oversupply of turkeys, so many that they were piled aboard refrigerated railroad cars and were being shuttled around to keep them cool.
Mr. Thomas happened to have visited the food kitchen of Pan American Airways. He noticed the aluminum trays used for the airline meals and asked for a sample. During his flight home, he tinkered with the sample, designing a three-compartment tray.
"I spent five years in the service, so I knew what a mess kit was," he said in a 1999 Associated Press interview. "You could never tell what you were eating because it was all mixed together."
First sold in 1954, just as television was becoming the dominant family pastime, the Swanson TV Dinner was packaged in a box designed to look like a TV screen. Swanson's first TV dinner consisted of turkey, cornbread dressing and gravy, buttered peas and sweet potatoes.
The TV dinner was a landmark for the frozen food industry, said Chris Krese, senior vice president for industry affairs of the American Frozen Food Institute in McLean, Va., a trade group representing the industry.
From a small start in the 1930's, frozen foods grew to exceed $1 billion a year in sales in the 1950's. Today, frozen foods bring in about $30 billion each year, according to the trade group's Web site.
While working in the marketing department at Campbell Soup, which bought Swanson in 1955, Mr. Thomas founded a consumer information program for the frozen food group, originally called the National Association for Frozen Food Packers.
He was chairman of the group in the 1960's. During that time, the association worked with microwave manufacturers to produce new food packaging without aluminum or other metals so that frozen meals could be heated in microwaves.
Mr. Thomas served as an Army officer during World War II and won a Bronze Star for his work in breaking a Japanese code.
Besides his wife, he is survived by seven children and six grandchildren.
After leaving the food industry, Mr. Thomas directed an art gallery in New York and served as a councilman in Paradise Valley, Ariz.
But he knew he would be remembered for the TV dinner. In 1999, he was honored with a handprint on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood, and late in life his e-mail address began with the phrase "OriginalTVDinner."
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