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Hamburger helper Takes On new Competition in Race To Offer Homemade Feel. The Ideal: One Pan, 15 minuts

Minneapolis - Bob Waldron is engaged in one of the food industry's fiercest battles. Sitting at a small conference table in his office, he recently revealed his latest, no-so-secret weapon.

"This might seem small to you," he said, tearing open a box of hamburger helper-the new Philly Cheeseteak variety- and pouring its packet of french-fried onions across the table. "but we generally have not had a crunch before."

The crunch is a big deal to Mr. Waldron, vice president for marketing at general Mills Inc. and the man currently responsible for Hamburger Helper. After 30 years as the undisputed king of dinner mixes, Hamburger helper suddenly faces a challenge. the food industry, obsessed for years with making products ever readier to eat, has had a revelation: Americans want to do a bit, but just a bit, of actual cooking.

This new awareness has food companies scrambling to come up with products that require little time and skill while still evoking the aura of home cooking. The new entries are called "conveient-involvement products." And they have given a sudden boost to the slow-growing, $15 billion convenientdinner busines - a category icluding frozen meals, prepared foods and dry mixes.

Pillsbury Co. calls its contribution the Green Giant Complete Skillet Meal, and boasts that its preparation requires 10 minutes of skillet jiggling. Similar claims are made by Nestle SA's Nestle USA, which offers Stouffer's brand Skillet Sensations, and by Agrilink Foods' Birds Eye, which calls its new meal in a pouch Voila! Meanwhile, Unilever PLC is pitching Lipton Sizzle & Stir, which is a lot like Hamburger helper, with pasta and seasoning in a box. At kraft, the giant food unit of Philip Morris Co., the Hamburger helper model has been applied to the oven with Stove Top oven Classics.

The same dishes could probably be whipped up in the microwave. But food-industry market researchers say the microwave chef is left with little sense of accomplishment.

Today, an estimated 44% of evening meals are prepared in 30 minutes or less. The food industry, aware that it must complete with the fast-food drive-through window, the pizza-delivery guy and precooked grocery-store dishes, has set out to reduce the time further still. Companies such as Pillsbury and Nestle have done exhaustive research on how many pots and pans harried chefs want to use and how long they want to spend at the stove so that they can still feel good about the result (answers: one and 15 minutes). Psychology is almost as important as flavor.

Ahead of the Curve

"Hamburger Helper was once thought to be something you did instead of cooking," says Steve Sanger, the chief executive of General Mills. "Now it is cooking."

Hamburger Helper has been a convenient-involvement product for 30 years-long before any such category existed. But now the competitition is turning up the heat, and the effect already is apparent. Hamburger helper's domination of the dry-dinner-mix category has slipped to 67% from70% five years ago, and that doesn't include the effect of new frozen entrees, which are included in another statistical category. Any serious loss of hamburger helper market share or sales growth would be damaging to General Mills, where Helper accounted for about 5% of the company's total earnings last year.

Assuming that it completes its acquisition of Pillsburg, General Mills will be the nation's third-largest food company, with annual sales of more than $13 billion. Only the company's huge breakfast-cereal portfolio accounts for more of its profits than helper.

Lean Times

general Mills vows to defend its brand, which has so far demonstrated remarkable resilience. helper, as everyone at General Mills affectionately calls it, was introduced in 1971, at a time of soaring beef prices and weak economic growth. The mix of pasta, cheese and "specially blended seasonings" was designed to help a family stretch one pound of meat into a hearty dinner for four or five, and at little cost. Today it sells for about $2 a box.

It was such an immediate hit that for a couple of years the company couldn't keep up with consumer demand. but within General Mills, there was some surprise when its popularity outlasted hard times.,p> The company had originally planned to call it Betty Crocker Casserole, but more-creative minds prevailed, and its perfect name helped Hamburger Helper become a classic symbol of American dining. After Spam, it is probably the subject of more jokes than any American food product. General Mills executives don't mind. Even Mr. Sanger, the CEO, chuckles when he recalls the movie "National lampoon's Vacation," in which cousin Eddie, a bit down on his luck, serves his family patties made entirely without beef. "Mm-mm-mm," says Eddie played by Randy Quaid. "I don't know why they call this stuff hamburger Helper. It does just fine by itself, hum?"

Helper became a joke to some, through not a stale one. To keep customers from growing tired of the product, General Mills has steadily added new flavors. When Italian food grew popular, Hlper unveiled Fettuccini Alfredo, Pizza Pasta and Double Cheese Pizza mixes. later, when Mexican food caught on, it introduced Beef Taco and Zesty Mexican. On top of that, the company extended the brand to new kinds of meat, adding Tuna helper in 1972 and Chicken Helper in 1984.

During the prosperous 1990s, people ate out so often that food-industry sales rose barely 1% a year. But Hamburger Helper sales increased by an average of 7% a year. This growth came despite aisles and aisles of new competition, especially from frozen entrees that required no cooking at all, beyond the pushing of microwave buttons.

For a time, frozen foods seemed like the ultimate answer in the quest for convenient meals. Technolgoical advances led to frozen foods that tasted as good as many restaurant offerings. At the same time, companies like Nestle and ConAgra Foods Inc. took their most popular frozen entrees-usually lasagna or macaroni and cheese-and bulked them up until they were big enough to serve entire families.

Initially, industry executives expected helper to lose sales to these more convenient products. But the extra work that Helper required turned out to be no disadvantage. It created the sensation of an old-fashioned home-cooked meal.

'You're Stirring, You're Browning'"With a frozen pizza, you're bring it out of a cold state, you're bringing it out of the morgue," says Mr. Waldron, the Hamburger helper manager. "There's not that much aroma. You don't feel great about it. Mom didn't really do much. With Helper, she's taking the meat, taking the protein and transforming it into a meal. You're stirring. you're browning. You're doing enough."

Now, after years of trying to combat Helper with pure microwave plays, competitors are developing their own products that require a few moments of cooking. Most are spearating themselves from Helper by including meat in the package, taking advantage of new technology that prevents the meat and vegetables from clumping into a big block of ice. They content that women (and the industry still assumes that women are doing the cooking), don't want to have to thaw out ground meat or drive to the grocery-store to get it.

One of those new products-Pillsburg Co's, Green Giant Complete Skillet Meal-no longer poses a threat, because General Mills is in the process of acquiring Pillsburg, pending regulatory approval.

But the others are making inroads. Those all-in-one frozen dinners for the family, a category that didn't exist six years ago, last year tallied sales of about $400 million. hamburger helper, which sells for less than healf the price of most of its frozen competition, also had sales of about $400 million.

Voila!

In developing its own frozen skillet dinner, Birds Eye surveyed consumers and found that they overwhelmingly preferred the skillet to the microwave. At the same time, the consumers said they wanted something quicker and easier than Hamburger Helper. Their solution: Voila! Each package of Voila! comes with meat, starch and vegetables. It's precooked, then frozen, Stouffer's Skillet Sensations and Green Giant complete Skillet Meals offer subtle variations but work much the same way.

"Consumers like this better because they don't have to think ahead of time about thawing out or purchasing the meat," says Jon Wright, director of marketing for frozen meals at Agrilink, a co-operative of processing and marketing companies.

Hamburger helper also faces threats of a nonfrozen variety. Kraft is attempting to pasta aisle. Kraft's Stove Top Oven Classics consist of a box full of sauces, seasonings and stuffing. Like helper, it requires the addition of meat. The difference is that Oven Classics are baked, not fried.

Mike Locascio, kraft's brand manager for Oven Classics, says his products require only five minutes of preparation, followed by 30 minutes in the oven. mom gets credit for 35 minutes of cooking time, but she can also tend to other business while the dinner bakes. The "magic" says Mr. Locascio, happens when she opens the oven door and lets the smell of home cooking waft through the house.

'Sunday Taste With Tuesday Effort'

"It's a Sunday taste with a Tuesday effort," he says. "Mom doesn't have to feel like she's making a sacrifice when she makes this."

Sales for the Kfrat dinner mixes, now more than two years old, grew by more than 50% last year, reaching $65 million, according to Information Resources Inc., which tracks grocery-store sales.

General Mills is fighting back. To compete directly with Kraft, it recently launched its own version of Chicken Helper for the oven. As for the contention of some competitors that consumers want meat included with the product, General Mills disagrees. The Helper chief , Mr. Waldron, says he is confident Helper will hold off the latest set of challengers by keeping a steady course-introducing a few new flavors every year and keeping prices low.

"We've alwyas had competition," he says, "but people have fundamentally missed key elements, I don't want to go into what they are, because that would be tipping off the competition. But eventually they've walked away."

Without tipping off rivals, mr. Waldron nonetheless offered a few hints as he left his office, where the french-fried onions remained scattered on his table, and headed downstairs to the company's Betty Crocker test kitchens. There, Kelly Thompson, production services manager, was cooking up several dishes of hamburger helper, including the Philly Cheesesteak, which gives off a strong, familiar aroma.

Ms. Thompson has been impressed with the performance of some of her competitors, she said, but she wonders how long their success will last. Once the novelty wears off, she said, the companies might be surprised to learn that consumers prefer buying and preparing their own meat.

'Obsessed with Meat'

"People are obsessed with meat," Ms. Thompson says. "That's why the meat comes wrapped in plastic in the display cases. People like to see what they're getting. They like the control factor."

As competition continues, she said, innovation will be more important than ever. Consumers haven't tired of Hamburger Helper the past 30 years in part because the company continues to unveil new flavors. Even the smallest innovation-making its top-selling Cheeseburger Macaroni flavor a little cheesier, for example-can keep a loyal customer from trying a competing product. Bold new flavors, such as Philly Cheesesteak, can accomplish more, brining in first-time customers and persuading old ones to buy more flavors than they had planned.

And the french-fried onions, which can be sprinkled on lightly or liberally, give the consumer a heightened sense of involvement in the cooking process. The frozen bags of meat, vegetables and noodies, she contended, don't allow for much improvisation.

General mills makes about 60 different Helper flavors, and the typical grocery store carries 18 of them at a time. it is up to Ms. Thompson, who prepares about 20,000 servings a year for consumer taste tests, to identify trends and recommend new flavors. She won't say what some of the next new flavors might be. But one thing that's certain is that the company will not need to respond to the trend toward increased involvement in the kitchen.

And Helper has another edge on the competition, one that harks back to the original idea behind the product: It's chaper. The suggested retail price for one of Stouffer's Skillet Sensations, for example, is $4.69, or $2.35 a serving. helper, even after adding the price of 90% lean ground beef, comes in at about $1 a serving.

If the economy slips into a recession, General Mills expects that many of its competitors will fade away. haburger helper, after all, was made for tough times.

Updated: Thursday, September 6, 2007.