'Meal kits' hit home

When historians look back at the year 1970, they might focus on events such as antiwar protests and the breakup of the Beatles.

When food historians look back, many may recall a very different event: the debut of Hamburger Helper. The inexpensive pasta-and-powdered-mix product - coming half a decade before microwave ovens went mainstream - quickly became popular among working mothers with less time to cook.

The dish, to which beef could be added, now represents the grandmother of a burgeoning food category: all-in-one meal kits. Like Hamburger Helper, the new kits are based on the concept of bringing together different elements of a meal - usually dinner - into one package.

Think of them as the civilian versions of the military's "meals ready to eat" (MRE), although marketers would prefer that they conjure up family dining - not chow time spent sitting on your ammo box.

In the early 1990s, Green Giant debuted its "Create A Meal," which added an assortment of vegetables to the powdered-sauce-and-pasta formula. Now, food manufacturers are broadening the meal-kit category to include an array of food combinations. In most cases even meat is included.

Meal-kit offerings currently in supermarkets include Campbell's Supper Bakes, Hormel's Dinty Moore Classic Bakes, General Mills' Betty Crocker Complete Meals, and ConAgra's Banquet Homestyle Bakes. The kits typically include about five servings and cost about $5.

But consumers can't just stick the kits in the oven - and that's part of the allure. Most of the kits require some work, like mixing the dried sauce with the meat and pouring it all into a baking dish.

"The opportunity to touch the ingredients, to be involved with cooking it, but not do it all, is very important to many people," says Marlene Johnson, a spokeswoman for Betty Crocker.

Convenience, mixed with a dash of labor, is the perfect recipe for American parents - often moms - seeking to spend less time in the kitchen without totally abandoning their roles as family mealmakers.

"These meals give the aura of home cooking that many mothers are looking for," says Barbara Haber, food historian and author of "From Hardtack to Homefries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals."

Home cooking has lost some ground over the past decade. In 1991, Americans bought an average of 91 takeout meals. By 2002, that number had jumped to 118, according to the NPD Group, a Port-Washington, N.Y., market-research firm.

And takeout took on new forms. By the mid-1990s, supermarkets began installing prepared-meal centers, where consumers picked up items such as fully cooked rotisserie chickens.

Food manufacturers soon followed suit, say experts, offering a wider range of prepared meals. "They realized that the long-term trend was away from tending [to] and cleaning up [after] three or four different items," says Harry Balzer, NPD Group vice president, who has been tracking Americans' eating habits for 23 years.

The economic slump has recently driven more people to eat in, and the number of meals Americans make at home has increased, say experts.

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