dinner was a turkey dinner; eventually, the company added chicken and beef entrées. With over half of American households owning televisions by the 1950s, the Swanson brothers called their frozen meals "TV dinners," suitable for eating on a folding tray in one's living room while watching television. TV dinner brand The Swanson & Sons' TV dinner branded frozen meal sold 5,000 units when it was first introduced in 1953; just one year later, the company had sold over 10,000,000 TV dinners. The company discontinued its successful butter and margarine business to concentrate on a poultry-based line of canned and frozen products. In April 1955, Swanson's 4,000 employees and 20 plants were acquired by the Campbell Soup Company. By 1956, the Swanson brothers were selling 13 million TV dinners annually. For the majority of its run, Swanson sponsored the game show, The Name's the Same, with Robert Q. Lewis, alternating sponsorship with the Bendix Home Appliance division of Avco, and then Johnson's Wax. In a few 1980s and 1990s commercials for the TV dinner, the announcer was Mason Adams. 1970s to present When Swanson's TV dinners launched in the 1950s, the product competed primarily with home-cooked food, and was developed with a relatively low price point for the consumer. By the 1970s, the increasing number of two-income families and single working parents shifted competition to restaurant food, either eaten at the restaurant or ordered to take home. During this period, American consumers were increasingly exposed to a greater variety of international cuisines and more sophisticated flavors, and the consumer was also growing more nutrition-conscious and discerning. Competing in this new environment required more expensive ingredients, but Swanson was slow to change its traditional menus, and slow to recognize the increasing importance of the microwave oven in the heat-and-eat food market. It continued to use non-microwaveable foil trays long after competitors had adopted microwaveable paper and plastic trays. Swanson eventually introduced a new line of frozen dinners called "Le Menu" in the 1980s which featured more sophisticated menus on undivided plastic microwavable plates with lids. But by then, the company was competing with many other strong brands, such as Stouffer's. Stouffer's had also begun targeting the diet market with its reduced-calorie Lean Cuisine frozen meal line. Swanson trailed behind these developments. In March 1998, Campbell Soup spun-off the Swanson frozen meal business along with several other brands, including Vlasic, to a company