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Even as early as 1879, Heinz touted the benefits of its ready-made catsup with this ad: "For the blessed relief of mother and other women of the household." In 1953, a year before Ray Kroc raised McDonald's now ubiquitous Golden Arches, a Swanson food technician named Betty Cronin created the "TV dinner." Back then, when meal preparation took an average two hours, the frozen meal on a three-section aluminum tray was lauded for helping mothers "burdened with baby-boom offspring." Today the once labor-intensive process of preparing a meal has been shrink-wrapped to a tidy 15 minutes.
Credit Boston Market (formerly Boston Chicken) with fomenting the HMR decade. The company, which first featured rotisserie chicken, transformed the notion of fast food by serving the kind of fare one would expect to come piping hot out of the kitchen oven but instead comes straight out of a ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat package. "We offer traditional food that people would cook at home if they had the time or the inclination," says Keith Robinson, chief marketing officer at Boston Market. "It's convenient, accessible, pretty affordable and easier than going to the supermarket. Our competition is Mom." Well, not quite. The 1,159-store nationwide franchise hatched a host of imitators that have added chickens roasting on spits and homey side dishes to their menus.
So consumers are being sated, but many investors are going hungry. Boston Market has produced excellent food and wretched numbers. The company's rapid expansion, a controversial franchising scheme and an overly ambitious menu racked up losses of $224 million on sales of $379 million last year. The stock has been plucked, falling from nearly $40 to $3. Buffeted by high promotional costs and declining per-store sales, the company announced that its three top officers, including co-founders Saad Nadhir and Scott Beck, had resigned. Boston Market quickly installed J. Michael Jenkins, a veteran restaurant executive credited with turning around the ailing Dallas-based El Chico chain.
Nevertheless, Boston Market has fundamentally changed the restaurant industry. More than half the meals ordered in a sit-down restaurant get up and go home to be eaten. According to the National Restaurant Association, this year the entire industry is growing at a modest 3% clip, while takeout is expanding at more than twice that, at 7%. "The restaurant has become a prepared supermarket," says the NPD Group's Balzer.
And the supermarket is slowly becoming more like a takeout restaurant. With more competitors taking a bigger bite out of their profits, supermarkets are steadily increasing their selection of prepared foods. According to a survey by the Food Marketing Institute, 22% of consumers bought ready-made food from supermarkets last year, nearly double the 12% who did so in 1996.