Swanson is a brand of TV dinners, broths, and canned poultry made for the North American and Hong Kong markets.

[citation needed] Carl A. Swanson (1879–1949) was a Swedish immigrant who worked on a farm in Blair, Nebraska, until he moved to Omaha.

In turn, they processed the eggs, made butter from the cream, and sold these products to distributors and charged a commission to the farmers.

One year later, in 1950, the Swanson brothers initially began manufacturing frozen oven-ready chicken and turkey pot pies in aluminum trays.

[1] They branched into full meals after Swanson executive Gerry Thomas visited the distributor of a company that specialized in preparing food for airlines.

[1] 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.

[citation needed] 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 for the consumer.

Swanson eventually introduced a new line of frozen dinners called "Le Menu" in 1983 which featured more sophisticated menus on undivided plastic microwavable plates with lids.

In the spin-off, Campbell Soup granted Pinnacle a ten-year license to use the Swanson name on frozen meals and pot pies.

Pinnacle continued to produce frozen meals, but it discontinued the use of the Swanson name in favor of the Hungry-Man brand; however, it remained in use for pot pies.