Unilever Takes Bertolli Brand Frozen;
Premium Dinner Line Debuts in USA

Hearty Chicken & Linguine is just one of eight premium dinners for two under Unilever’s Bertolli brand.

After two years of development and successful test marketing in northeast, pasta-based Dinners for Two headed for national rollout, with massive advertising campaign.

Bertolli? In the United States, it’s been just olive oil and pasta sauces, but in Europe the brand covers a wide range of products like Italian specialty sandwiches. Now it’s making its debut in the USA for premium frozen dinners.
That’s despite the fact that the premium dinner segment has faltered of late, and despite a profit warning in September that made Wall Street analysts skeptical of the parent Unilever Group’s involvement in such slow growth categories.

With Unilever unloading some of its food operations in Europe and outsourcing production for Birds Eye frozen foods in the United Kingdom, there has been speculation that the Anglo-Dutch consumer products giant might be gradually lowering its profile in the retail food business. But that doesn’t seem likely from the push Unilever put behind two years of test marketing of the Bertolli frozen dinner line in the northeastern United States. That test was pronounced a “phenomenal success” by Brian Manning, senior director for Bertolli, who said the brand achieved a 37% penetration of the segment.

National rollout is now under way, with heavy TV and print ad support and in-store promotion. McCann Erickson Worldwide, a leading ad agency, is in charge of the campaign, which will push the message that consumers can now get restaurant quality meals that take only 10 minutes to prepare at home.

An Italian Restaurant in the Kitchen

Complete Skillet Dinners for Two, according to the company, are “meant to bring an Olive Garden-like dining experience to your kitchen.” Just why these are dinners for two when single-serve dinners are the rule, isn’t explained, but it may have to do with a similar venture by Marie Callender – or even a store-brand line of reduced calorie Dinners for Two from Safeway Stores.

The Bertolli line includes eight varieties – Grilled Chicken Alfredo; Italian Sausage and Rigatoni; Shrimp Scampi and Linguine; Spinach and Ricotta Cheese Ravioli; Chicken Parmigiana and Penne; Chicken and Garden Vegetable Primavera; Roasted Chicken and Linguine; and Shrimp, Penne and Asparagus.

Unlike the Safeway dinners, they aren’t nutritionally correct. The Spinach and Ricotta Cheese Ravioli, for example, packs 27 grams of fat, 42% of the recommended daily total, and a whopping 1,350 milligrams of sodium, 56% of the recommended daily intake. The prices for the 24 oz. items aren’t light either – $7.59 at Price Chopper, an upstate New York chain where they were test marketed.

Bertolli chef Anthony Strong spent three months in Italy, working to perfect the product for distribution in the United States, according to The New Times, an online alternative newspaper in Syracuse, New York. “You can have a total Italian experience in 15 minutes,” he said during a visit to the e-paper. “The packet is made up of individually frozen pieces – it’s not one big clump of ingredients. The herbs aren’t pre-cooked; you cook them and that releases the aromas.”

The New Times said a run in its test kitchen bore that out. “After placing the spinach and ricotta cheese ravioli in a non-stick skillet and covering it, the place smelled great and in ten minutes we had dinner,” the e-paper reported. “Despite the nutritional gut-check, Bertolli Dinner for Two is a welcome addition to the undisputed category leader of frozen foods. According to A.C. Neilson, consumption of Italian frozen entrees hit a nearly 10% increase from 2000 to 2001.”

More recent figures from Information Resources, Inc (IRI), cited by Advertising Age in a more skeptical article, said that sales in the $1 billion frozen dinner and entrée category had dropped three percent for the 52 weeks ended Oct. 3. The same article pointed out that sales of even the leading brands in its $27 billion frozen foods segment dropped 1.5%. IRI data, Ad Age said, also show that another high-profile venture by Unilever – low-carb versions of standard items like mayonnaise and peanut butter – has been a flop.

Careful Positioning

Despite seeming to buck a trend of overall category declines, however, Manning noted that the Bertolli lineup of pasta-based Italian meals is targeted squarely within the premium multiserve segment, which is “growing substantially at rates of between 5%-10% annually,” he said. ConAgra Foods’ Marie

Callender’s Complete Dinners, for example, grew by double-digits over the past year. By contrast, sales of Nestlé’s Skillet Sensations, which successfully launched in 1998, have dropped by double-digits over the past year. Nestlé is now trying other ideas, such as whole-grain Lean Cuisine Spa Cuisine.

But the Italian angle may make all the difference, according to Unilever. Bertolli started life in 1870 when Francesco Bertolli and his wife Caterina opened a small shop in Lucca, Tuscany, Italy. The family company was the first to export olive oil, supplying Italian emigrants to the US with the Italian foodstuffs they missed.

Today Bertolli represents Italian-inspired, healthy Mediterranean cuisine, with a range of olive oils, spreads, dressings, pasta sauces and meal solutions, and sales have grown by 10% a year over the past three years to reach $600 million. So the same expertise that made it possible to leverage the brand into new categories in Europe is now being applied to the US market.

Nestlé Gets Out of Frying Pan, Renames Skillet Dinner Line

Swiss food giant Nestlé is going to have to stop calling its frozen stir-fry dinners “Skillet Sensations” after a year-long trademark battle with the Applebee’s restaurant chain.

Nestlé spokeswoman Roz O’Hearn said the company’s Stouffer’s subsidiary in the United States would rename the meals “Stouffer’s Skillets” and “Lean Cuisine Skillets” in the spring of 2005.

The two companies filed a joint motion to settle a lawsuit against Nestlé filed by Applebee’s in October 2003, claiming the company’s use of ‘Skillet Sensations’ on its meals would confuse consumers with Skillet Sensations meals sold in Applebee’s outlets – which were on the market first.

Applebee’s said it began using the Skillet Sensations name in 1996 for entrees consisting of meat, poultry or fish with vegetables, sold in company restaurants or through takeout. Stouffer’s began using Skillet Sensations about a year later for frozen prepared dinners consisting of meat, vegetables and potatoes with rice or pasta.