Where is stouffers made

But Top of the Town—despite its lonely presence in a sea of parking lots and snails-pace urban-renewal projects—had the views! For decades magnificent lake and city vistas kept people coming. By the s, however, Top of the Town was losing its edge. Downtown dining—except for the Flats—was less popular and the restaurant and its food were getting a bit rough around the edges. In January Top of the Town closed and within a year the company was out of the foodservice business.

Most of these—on a clear day—could be seen from Top of the Town. For full functionality please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Need Help? Market was located on Sheriff Street East 4th St. It was built in The Stouffer family's Cottage Creamery Co. Get Directions. Related Tours Classic Cleveland Restaurants.

Subjects Food. Gordon realized that, to attain chain status, the Stouffer restaurants' menus, decor, and ambiance should coordinate. He therefore promoted standard uniforms for waitresses--or "Stouffer Girls" as he called them--and launched the slogan, "Everybody is somebody at Stouffers. The burgeoning company's progress was curtailed by World War II, but growth recommenced in , when Stouffer's opened its first suburban restaurant in Cleveland's Shaker Square neighborhood.

Postwar suburbanization spawned Stouffer's first diversification in the company's year history: customers at the Shaker Square restaurant began to ask manager Wally Blankinship to freeze popular menu items for reheating at home. Blankinship soon realized the potential of frozen food, and began to sell the items in a separate business called the Club.

The evolution of Stouffer's frozen foods from a restaurant atmosphere strongly influenced their development. Packaging, for example, focused on entrees, rather than entire meals. And without the concept of mass production driving the business, Stouffer's dishes differed from normal frozen fare in their high quality and abundance of meat and vegetables.

The products introduced a premium segment to the frozen food market. Stouffer's volume of frozen food business grew so quickly that, in , the company built a pilot processing plant in downtown Cleveland. That year, the company was officially named Stouffer Foods Corporation. In , Stouffer made its first venture into the hotel business with the purchase of Fort Lauderdale, Florida's Anacapri Inn. The move gave the company three divisions: Stouffer Hotel Co.

The restaurant group launched its "top" restaurants in the s. These eateries were located atop skyscrapers in major cities, combining fine dining with a view of the city.

By , there were six such restaurants around America. As more and more women entered the work force after World War II, homemakers had less time to prepare elaborate meals, and demand for convenience foods rose.

To meet the increased production requirements, Stouffer constructed a highly automated and modernized frozen food plant in on a acre site in Solon, Ohio, just south of Cleveland. In the late s, Stouffer's consumer research showed that families with two or more children constituted a considerable segment of sales volume.

Assuming a market for multi-serving packages, Stouffer developed a "Family Casserole" line serving four or more people. But Stouffer's research didn't take trends toward split meals and split menus into account.

Split meals are eaten by families with conflicting activities that are unable to eat together. Split menu diners eat at the same time, but not all of the family members eat the same thing. The larger families that purchased Stouffer's products were not necessarily eating multiple packages of a single product, but utilizing the single-serving packages for split meals and menus.

Although the Family Casserole line was basically a failure, it did launch frozen lasagna, which became an instant success in single- and double-serving sizes.

The frozen foods division earned the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration's endorsement when Stouffer's products were chosen to feed Apollo 11, 12, and 14 astronauts while in quarantine after their history-making space voyages. Advertising at the time exploited Stouffer's support of the space program with the tag line, "Everybody who's been to the moon is eating Stouffer's.

But unlike Stouffer's other two divisions, the hotel group's image had deteriorated. In , former hotel busboy and ex-Marine William Hulett was appointed to the presidency of the hotel group.

Hulett embarked on a revitalization of the hotel chain by terminating its franchising program and liquidating seven struggling franchised holdings. He then began a decade-long acquisitions spree that brought several prestigious hotels into the Stouffer group, including: Washington, D.

Stouffer Foods had become America's leading manufacturer of premium quality frozen foods by the early s. To meet growing consumer demand, the company increased its production capacity in , building a frozen foods plant in Gaffney, South Carolina. Noting growing sales of diet foods and drinks in the s, Stouffer Foods began research and development for a product that revolutionized the frozen food industry. Almost a decade of consumer and demographic research directed the brand extension.

Focus groups indicated the things that dieters didn't like about low-calorie food: inferior taste, unappealing appearance, meager portions, and lack of variety. The Stouffer Corporation was not the only company to produce frozen dinners in the s.

Swanson and Sons began selling its "TV dinners" through supermarkets in Stouffer originally set itself apart from Swanson's though. The TV dinners targeted the mass market, but Stouffer originally sought the high-end market by touting the quality of its products. In the early s, Stouffer Foods executives began selling their frozen meals to selected supermarkets.

Eventually, the company had to open a new automated plant in Solon, Ohio, to deal with the demand for its products. The Stouffer Corporation was a publicly-traded company by this time. In , Litton Industries bought the company.

In , Nestle S.