The New York Times
and The Cincinnati Enquirer

The pot roast of childhood memories, holiday meals and Sunday dinners was selected with care, lovingly rubbed with spices, basted and watched carefully as it slowly cooked for hours.

Today, a pot roast takes about six minutes. In the microwave.

QUICK HOME-COOKING

Why are quick-heat meals gaining popularity? "Mothers are feeling guilty about not having sit-down meals with their families," said Barbara Haber, a food historian and the author of From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals. Quick-heat meats, she said, "can create more of an illusion of a home-cooked meal than bringing in a stack of hamburgers. I think that probably the person who makes the decision about what's for dinner will like them." In one new Tyson commercial, a mother and father are watching their daughter board a school bus, while the voiceover seems to read their minds. "You blinked and suddenly your little girl is not so little anymore," the announcer says. "We know how time flies. That's why Tyson has introduced ready-to-eat beef and pork roasts." Food companies are also playing a nostalgia card with adults by trying to equate their products with the memories of long-gone childhoods. The packaging of Tyson's beef meatloaf reminds consumers that "when Grandma was queen of the kitchen, she guarded her meatloaf recipe like Fort Knox guards its gold." And, "if anyone asks, just say it's an old family recipe that's as good as gold." Although nutrition experts caution that consumers should carefully monitor the salt content of prepackaged foods, they said the quick-serve meats encourage people to stay out of fast-food restaurants and eat at home, which usually means eating healthier foods. "The only concern I have is this whole generation doesn't know how to cook," Julie Walsh, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, said. "There's a whole subset of Americans that don't know where their food comes from. They just have not a clue. Kids are raised this way. They think everything comes from a package or a container, and that's not real food."

To appeal to overscheduled families - and to try to reverse declining sales - food companies are offering up hyper-speed versions of old-fashioned comfort foods: the six-minute beef pot roast, the five-minute pineapple-glazed ham, the five-minute pork tenderloin in teriyaki sauce and the nine-minute meatloaf.

In the parlance of the companies, including Springdale-based John Morrell & Co., these are quick-heat meats. An ad for Morrell's Convenient Cuisine, running on the first inning of each Cincinnati Reds radio broadcast, touts how dinner can be popped in the microwave and be ready by the end of that inning.

"The family dinner wasn't all about mom standing in the kitchen cooking all day and then cleaning up the dishes for several hours," said Jack Dunn, the general manager and senior vice president for refrigerated processed meats at Tyson. "The family dinner was about sitting down and eating a good meal together."

That aside, families today just don't have the same kind of time to cook, Dunn said.

"People want to sit down and have the kind of family meals that they had when they were growing up. If we can help them do that, that's what it's all about," he said.

Tyson makes nearly all of its quick-heat meat products at its plant in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The plant, which smells faintly of seasoning salt, is sterile, white and cold, with temperatures hovering between 36 and 45 degrees. A beef roast, which arrives at the plant cleaned and bound, is placed on 24-foot conveyer belts where it is injected with a marinade, slathered with dry seasonings and dumped into a large vacuum tumbler that bastes up to three tons of meat at a time.

When the roast emerges, looking as if it has been soaked in barbecue sauce, it is weighed and trimmed by workers wearing white lab coats, rubber boots, hair nets and plastic gloves. The roasts are then sealed in individual airtight plastic pouches and loaded onto metal carts that will be wheeled into a 40-foot-by-8-foot stainless steel oven. There, about six tons of meat is left to cook for about 91/2 hours.

At the end of the cooking process, the roasts are showered in 50-degree water and then chilled in such a way that ice crystals, which can damage meat and drain moisture, do not form. Then the product is repackaged to be shipped out to grocery stores around the country.

"This really is a response to the fast-food restaurant trend that we saw develop in the late '80s, early '90s," said Harry Balzer, a vice president with NPD Group, a sales and marketing consulting company.

Small food companies began putting quick-heat meat entrees in grocers' refrigerators about seven years ago, but the sector began to grow in popularity only within the last year, as large meat processors gobbled up many of the smaller companies and began renaming the products, Balzer said.

The quick-heat meal business is dominated by Hormel Foods, which bought Flint Hill Foods in 1998 and gained its microwave-ready meat line, and by Tyson Foods, the new owner of IBP, a beef and pork processing company that had marketed a line of quick-heat meats under the Thomas E. Wilson brand. The other competitors in the $150 million business are:

• RMH Foods, which makes the Quick-N-Easy line of products.

• Mosey's, which makes seven meat entrees that can be prepared in seven minutes.

• John Morrell, which makes eight different entrees in the Convenient Cuisine line. The products come in microwave-safe black trays, so there's "no dirty dishes, cleanup or mess," according to the company's Web site.

In February, Tyson Foods reintroduced its precooked meat line, unveiling a $100 million marketing campaign as part of an effort to reverse a decline in meat sales. Tyson officials said the company is hoping to catch up with the chicken industry, which has been selling precooked and pre-seasoned meats for years.

"We made a decision that we were going to take commodity beef and pork and begin to add value to those products to make it easier for today's consumer," said Dunn, whose company will soon introduce a line of fully cooked bacon. "If you cook it or portion-control it, then your product is not tied as directly to a commodity market, and you're going to smooth out your earnings and you're also going to increase your returns."

The quick-heat meat business is still small. Dunn estimated that Tyson, for example, sold about $60 million in quick-heat products last year, out of total company sales of $23 billion. But the companies are hoping that more convenient entrees could become a staple at the dinner table, as more families try to balance family meals with responsibilities outside the home.