Your Money’s Worth

Take the cheapest pasta you can find. The five pound bag of spaghetti marked down to 99 cents. Take the cheapest, commercially prepared sauce you can find. The extra large can of “tomato sauce” that looks worse than dog food, even on the artfully designed label. Cook the pasta in salted water, heat and add the sauce, and you still have a higher quality product than you usually buy frozen in the supermarket. On top of that, you could freeze that into dozens of portions and save yourself a fortune.

I was talking with a chef yesterday who was a former employee of an unnamed supermarket giant. He was in charge of designing the recipes that would be used for the frozen foods section. His example for our topic of conversation was lasagna. Lasagna is something that pretty much anyone with any cooking skills can prepare at home, but that which is frequently purchased and consumed as frozen individual meals.

His first step would be to find a good lasagna recipe. One that would make your mouth water if it were served to you at the dinner table; a hearty wedge fresh from the oven. The gooey baked cheese, creamy ricotta, beautiful ripe tomato sauce and savory chunks of meat melding beautifully with delightful fragrant and delicious basil, garlic, onions and so forth.

Then he submits this recipe to corporate headquarters. They say the recipe looks great, the food is fantastic, but the price is too high. Much, much too high - even though it is maybe only a dollar a portion. So this very experienced chef, who just created a wonderful lasagna that everyone would surely enjoy, instead of spending time in the kitchen, sits in front of a computer for a weekend, crunching numbers to try and reduce its price.

His goal is to bring the cost of this dollar portion of lasagna down to about 48 cents. He’s resistant, but something has got to give or the product will never hit the market. He lowers the grade of tomatoes. He adds more water to the sauce. He reduces a percentage of the meat. He cuts out an ounce of cheese. He thickens it with starch, removes the flavorful herbs and reluctantly submits it for approval as a diluted, pale impostor of lasagna with a price tag of 48 cents. It’s approved.

From there, the established portion then has to be placed in packaging. Since it is to be frozen and distributed, even the least expensive cardboard container must have a special sealing for freezer-protection. By the time this basic packaging is already established, the cost of the product has already doubled. Of course, a plain unbleached box cannot sell a product. A marketing team and food photographers conjure up a beautiful Italian themed label, a picture-perfect lasagna (probably the original before being distorted to the package’s contents) and send it to the printers. Obviously, multi-colored printing also does not come cheap, so the price is inflated yet again.

By the time the lasagna is packaged and labeled it’s cost has increased near thricefold, to about $1.20. Then you have to factor in shipping, storage, assembly; maybe a small kickback to the chef that came up with the recipe in the first place, and, of course, in order for the retailer to make any sort of profit, the price gets inflated even more.

By the time you see it in the supermarket, the 48 cent lasagna is being sold for, I don’t know, $3.50? That’s a product with already inexpensive ingredients: pasta, tomato, ground beef. What about an equally popular dish, like chicken alfredo, which should have expensive white breast meat, cream, butter and Parmesan cheese? What if that was designed by a Brand Name company, which, on top of the aforementioned mark-ups, also is accounting for television and other types of advertising?

Just something to think about the next time you see frozen dinners marked down to 99 cents. Even if the store is simply clearing inventory - barely making a profit - what are you really getting for your money?