If there was an award for truth in packaging, Pinnacle Foods of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, would make the short list.
The company's revamped Swanson Hungry-Man dinners promise gut-busting portions of meat and potatoes, and that is exactly what they deliver.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
The new Hungry-Man Sports Grill line, for example, consists of three meals that definitely aren't a part of a weight-loss diet, including beer-batter fried chicken strips with cheddar steak fries.
The Sports Grill boxes blare "1 pound of Food" and depict vegetable-free mounds of cheese-drenched treats.
The marketing strategy may seem counterintuitive, given trends toward lighter cuisine; even fast-food chains are slimming down their menus. But Pinnacle's decision to attract the self-indulgent has already paid off handsomely -- at least for Thomas Hicks, the Dallas-based buyout specialist perhaps better known as the owner of the Texas Rangers in baseball and the Dallas Stars in hockey.
In May 2001, Hicks' firm, Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, bought Vlasic Foods International and its Swanson brand for US$370 million.
Rechristened Pinnacle Foods, the company was charged with reinvigorating the Hungry-Man line.
Rather than slimming down the dinners to compete with Stouffer's Lean Cuisine, the top-selling line last year in the US$6.1 billion frozen dinner and entree industry, Pinnacle gambled on cornering a group that buys a lot of big and tall clothing: men ages 18 to 49.
So out went the peas and pearl onions, and in came Hungry-Man XXL Angus Beef Meatloaf and the Hungry-Man Hearty Hero Cheeseburger. To drive the point home, Hungry-Man conducted a sweepstakes tied to the syndication of The King of Queens, the sitcom whose main character often drinks beer and watches football.
The Sports Grill line, which hit supermarkets last August, is the most recent phase of the brand makeover.
"We asked, `What are some meal scenarios that are not quite the same as sit-down when you're eating out?'" said Frank Thometz, Pinnacle's vice president for marketing of frozen dinners. "And we identified something we call `casual indulgence.'"
Think alcohol-fueled grazing across platters of wings, nachos and other staples of sports bars -- where Pinnacle's food designers headed to study what men eat when catching a game without their wives.
The beer-batter chicken was the easiest of the three entrees to develop Thometz said. The pulled-pork sandwich and chicken quesadilla were harder.
"It was a question of, how do we get those breads to come out of the microwave with a moist texture?" he said.
But Pinnacle's food scientists came up with the formulation, and the line started with a none-too-subtle TV ad: Two rotund men gab in a locker room, and the one who chooses watercress tea sandwiches for dinner in lieu of a Sports Grill is blown away by a hair dryer. The tagline is: "It's good to be full."
In less than six months last year, the Sports Grill dinners racked up nearly US$12 million in sales, according to Information Resources. For all of last year, the Hungry-Man XXL dinners rang up US$17.8 million. Overall, Thometz said, Hungry-Man sales are up 46 percent since Vlasic became Pinnacle.
The biggest winnermay be Hicks. He sold Pinnacle last September to JP Morgan Partners, the private-equity arm of JP Morgan Chase, for US$485 million -- a 31 percent profit in just two years.
Whether Hungry-Man can continue to buoy Pinnacle is up for debate: Despite Sports Grill's success, Hungry-Man dinners are just the ninth best-selling frozen dinners in the US, according to Information Resources.
Hungry-Man could still use more hungry men.
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