After <i> Fresher </i> and <i> Healthier, </i> Food Processors Are Aiming for <i> Faster</i> : Trends: Shorter preparation times are the latest goal in ongoing pursuit of consumer dollars.

First there was canned food. Then came frozen. Now major American food companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in hopes of spurring the third revolution in food processing. From Campbell Soup Co. and Kraft General Foods Inc. to Geo. A. Hormel & Co. and Nestle Foods Corp., the battle is on to perfect new technologies that will enable consumers to prepare food faster than ever.

On one flank is “chilled food”: freshly prepared entrees, soups, salads and desserts sold in the refrigerated sections of local supermarkets. On the other side is a raft of new microwaveable entrees that require neither the refrigerator nor the freezer. These so called shelf-stable products, frequently sold next to the canned meats and vegetables, are processed much the same way as canned food, but in plastic trays and tubs that can be popped into the microwave, zapped and eaten without a single dish being dirtied.

Yet despite several valiant experiments in chilled and shelf-stable food, it remains unclear whether these new processing technologies will be copied around the world or become merely footnotes in the annals of food history.

“Other processing systems were also hailed as the third revolution but never got off the ground,” Carl Stinnett, Campbell’s senior vice president of sales and marketing, recently reminded a group of executives from the chilled-food industry. There was freeze-dried food, “which outside of coffee never got perking,” and irradiation, “which got zapped by the consumer,” Stinnett recalled.

The advent of the microwave, which is now in more than 75% of American homes, is largely responsible for the latest technological efforts.

To many manufacturers, the freshly prepared refrigerated foods seem to be the answer to consumers’ increasing demands for meals that not only can be prepared quickly but also are fresher and healthier.

Yet, to date, the chilled-food experiments launched by national food companies such as Campbell and General Foods have run into problems because of the costs of delivering the food in a timely fashion. That, plus the high price tag (often three times as much as a frozen meal) and concerns over packaging safety have kept consumers from becoming loyal buyers, if buyers at all.

Shelf-stable products, such as Hormel’s Top Shelf line of entrees or Dial Corp.’s Lunch Bucket selection of soups, pastas and potato entrees, don’t create delivery problems. At the same time they offer consumers far greater speed than frozen food; they can be cooked in less than two minutes and without the necessary tending and turning required of frozen meals. However, taste remains a large stumbling block. No matter what the manufacturers say about the shelf-stable products, the taste, to date, remains one of a highly processed food, much like canned goods that sell for less than half the price.

A soon-to-be-released taste test conducted by the Center for Science in the Public Interest concluded that the new products “are simply beef stew, spaghetti and meatballs in snazzy new high-tech microwaveable containers” at considerably higher costs, said Jayne Hurley, the center’s associate nutritionist. “The foods tasted like they had stringy meat, mushy noodles, mealy potatoes and limp vegetables,” Hurley said. An informal tasting by the Washington Post Food Section staff concurred.

It is no wonder then that prepared frozen food, far and away, remains king, with Americans buying more than $9 billion worth of dinners, pizzas, sandwiches, breakfast foods and baked goods. Including frozen vegetables, ice cream, juices and other frozen items, Americans purchased more than $15 billion of frozen food in 1989.

“Frozen still fills a quality and value niche that is still pretty unique,” said Tony Adams, Campbell’s vice president of marketing research. In fact, Adams added, “I continue to see frozen deliver the most consistently high quality (of prepared foods) for the foreseeable future.”

Even so, Campbell, which owns Le Menu and Swanson frozen foods, is not taking any chances. The company is on its third test of chilled products -- despite having lost more than $25 million with its first two experiments, according to food-industry sources. At the same time it has just introduced 10 different flavors of ready-to-serve microwaveable cups of soup, ready to eat in two to three minutes.

The high hopes for chilled food come in large part from Europe, where refrigerated entrees, salads and desserts sell extremely well. At England’s famous Marks & Spencer chain, “you have to search high and low to find a frozen product,” said Richard E. Cristol, executive director of the Chilled Food Assn. “Almost all the food is refrigerated,” he commented.

Based on Europe’s experience, refrigerated food could be a “$2 to $5 billion business” here, said Mary Kay Haben, who as vice president of marketing and strategy for Kraft USA’s refrigerated-food group is spearheading Kraft’s 18-month-old test of “Chillery” fresh foods in the Kansas City area.

Yet Haben is the first to admit that the frozen-food industry is not as strong in Europe. And as long as consumers can “buy a fairly decent frozen meal for under $2,” refrigerated food, which has sometimes sold for three times that much, will find it hard to be competitive, noted food consultant Willard Bishop. “Consumers want fresh, high-quality product, but not if it costs an arm and a leg. No one wants to spend $5.50 to $6 for a meal” purchased in the supermarket, he said.

The high price helped kill Campbell’s year-long test, called Today’s Taste, in the Washington metropolitan area in 1986, as well as General Food’s Culinova experiment in New York, which was scrapped after two years in 1988. To preserve the product’s freshness and perceived healthfulness, General Foods employees not only delivered the food directly to the stores but also stocked it in specially designed refrigerated kiosks. Although this system cut shipping and warehousing time, it was “horrendously expensive and (drove) the price of the items in the Culinova line into the stratosphere,” concluded a 1988 Find-SVP study on shelf-stable and refrigerated microwaveable meals.

However, as Campbell discovered in its second test, without a separate delivery system, its “Fresh Chef” refrigerated products arrived in stores so late that only one or two days remained before the expiration dates. With consumers reluctant to buy a fresh product so close to the expiration date, Campbell found itself with costly cases of returns. As a result, Campbell is using its own delivery system in its current experiment, Fresh Kitchen, while also offering far-less-expensive products.

Beyond the delivery system and high prices, the chilled-food industry has perhaps an even greater problem: convincing consumers that the product is free of preservatives but still safe and easy to handle. Why, for instance, does store-purchased fresh chicken salad last 30 days but homemade chicken salad last only three days? (The answer is in the way the salad was packaged.)

“Quite frankly, we have a real challenge before us,” admits Cristol, who normally is very upbeat about the industry’s prospects. “We want consumers to know they are dealing with the equivalent of perishable food, but we don’t want to frighten them.”

Unfortunately, concerns over packaging -- including those voiced by the Food and Drug Administration -- have raised these fears. Although the FDA has not yet encountered any major health problems, officials say they are concerned that improper packaging of refrigerated food could encourage the growth of pathogens -- “or things that make you sick” -- while masking signs of spoilage, such as off-odors and colors, that would let consumers know the product is unsafe, explained Patricia Schwartz, acting director of FDA’s division of food chemistry and technology. “So far we’ve been lucky.”

Despite these problems, food manufacturers remain bullish about the prospect of chilled foods. “After all, the frozen-food industry was not an overnight success; it took some 30 years for the industry to turn into what it is today,” says Milton C. Miles, president of FreshNes Foods Corp., which is Nestle’s chilled-food venture, now being tested in Ohio.

But retailers caution that by the time the refrigerated-food industry overcomes the delivery, marketing and safety issues, the taste of shelf-stable products may have improved to the point that chilled products become obsolete.

If the taste is equivalent, “then why should you buy chilled food, which you have to eat in 24 hours, when you can buy a shelf-stable product and keep it on your pantry shelf for months?” said Peter J. O’Gorman, senior vice president for development and marketing for the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. Inc.

Technological improvements that enable plastic to withstand the heat, moisture and pressure of canning have brought about the development of shelf-stable foods. The trays, which are a complex layer of different plastics, act as an oxygen barrier the same way a steel or tin can does. As Paul Gillis, product-marketing manager for Hormel’s shelf-stable Top Shelf products, explained, the fresh ingredients are vacuum packed, without any additives or preservatives, into plastic trays and sealed tight. The trays then are put into a large pressure cooker and processed much like a can of stew or spaghetti.

Hormel designed its Top Shelf line “because we really felt there would be a need for foods that were a little bit faster to prepare and could be portable and taken anywhere,” said Robert Patterson, Hormel’s group vice president for the prepared-food group.

The potential is enormous, perhaps as much as $4.4 billion by 1994, said Ted Keller, Pet Inc.’s vice president of sales and marketing for healthy foods. In February, Pet plans to launch a test of six “Progresso To Go” shelf-stable products, from savory turkey with vegetables to cheese tortellini salad, in Washington and two other metropolitan areas.

The biggest market for these meals, Keller said, is the brown-bag luncher. “It is an incredibly large number and growing -- over 35% of all Americans brown-bag at one point and the average income of these brown-baggers is over $30,000.” The portability and speed of preparation of these new shelf-stable products should be appealing to the on-the-go luncher, Keller said.

However, to appeal to consumers, manufacturers must first address a major marketing problem. To encourage sales, the products have been packaged to resemble frozen entrees, not canned goods. But, as a result, a consumer handling a warm package might associate these products with thawed and spoiled frozen meals that they have been warned for years not to eat. Hormel hopes to convince consumers otherwise with its 1990 $20 million advertising campaign.

But Hormel may find itself at another disadvantage as frozen-food companies rush to introduce new, healthier entrees. Top Shelf’s Oriental pepper steak had the same amount of calories as the same entree by Healthy Choice, a new frozen product from ConAgra Inc, designed for the cholesterol and sodium conscious. But Top Shelf’s Oriental pepper steak contained 10 grams of fat and 1,700 milligrams of sodium; Healthy Choice had six grams of fat and 530 milligrams of sodium.

Even if the shelf-stable and refrigerated products can overcome their seemingly monumental problems and become the next revolution in food technology, it’s doubtful that the frozen-food industry will come to a chilling halt.

As Charles Weiss, a principal of Weston Group Inc., a management consulting group that advises large food companies, noted: “Feeding the American public is a big enough job that there’s probably room for all of these basic systems to work.”