An Omaha commodities company, a chairman with a new idea and a 1989 frozen dinner.

Healthy Choice is an American brand of frozen meals and other grocery foods owned by Conagra Brands, the Chicago-based food company formerly called ConAgra. ConAgra created it in-house, and it has belonged to the same company since its launch. English Wikipedia gives its introduction year as 1989.

The fullest dated account of how the name began is a profile of ConAgra’s chairman, Charles M. Harper, known as Mike, which The New York Times published on 26 February 1992. The reporter, Trish Hall, described a company that had long been seen as a staid commodities business, and noted that its corporate biography, published in 1989, carried the self-deprecating title “Conagra Who?”. According to the article, Harper changed the way he ate in the mid-1980s and then pushed ConAgra to develop a new line of products under the Healthy Choice name.

The Times traced the idea to a lunch at Harper’s home. He invited L. James Kennedy, ConAgra’s vice president for marketing, and the two men ate a turkey chili made by Harper’s wife, Josie. Kennedy told the paper that both of them reached the same conclusion over the meal about how such food could taste. Within the company, the article said, the episode that set the project going was jokingly referred to as “the motivational moment”, and executives said Harper’s intervention gave the push to plans they were already considering.

In 1989, the Times reported, ConAgra put out a frozen dinner under the Healthy Choice label. By the time of the profile the name had spread well beyond dinners. The paper listed hot dogs, cold cuts, soups and a frozen dairy dessert among the products then on sale, and said many more were in development. English Wikipedia’s current description of the brand is similarly broad, covering frozen dinners, side dishes, soups and popcorn.

Factory kitchens, a 2009 reset and bowls for a new decade.

Making frozen dinners on an industrial scale shaped what went into the trays. In the same 1992 article, Jim Seiple, ConAgra’s vice president of product development, told the Times that some spices change over time once a dish is frozen, with some flavours growing stronger and others fading. The paper explained that flour could not be used in gravies because it did not stand up to the pumping action of automated equipment, and that modified food starch was used instead.

In April 2009, The New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott reported that the company, then based in Omaha, had begun an effort to reintroduce the Healthy Choice line of frozen meals and other products to consumers. ConAgra’s chief marketing officer, Joan Chow, told the paper the goal was “breaking through the fog of familiarity consumers have with the brand.” The trade site just-food reported on 3 April 2009 that ConAgra said it had “reinvented” Healthy Choice, and that the relaunch combined new recipes with a humorous advertising campaign, a pack redesign and a website makeover. The meat-industry site Meatingplace, the same day, called it a revamp of the 20-year-old brand.

The 2009 relaunch also brought new products. The Times named a line of All Natural Entrées, and Meatingplace listed Complete Meals, Select Entrées, Café Steamers, Fresh Mixers and soups among the products that would carry the refreshed branding.

In a press release issued from Chicago on 15 May 2017, by which time the company was trading as Conagra Brands, it announced Healthy Choice Power Bowls, four bowls it described as inspired by international cuisine. The company said the bowls themselves were made from a plant-based fiber rather than plastic, and that the meals would reach national distribution by August that year.

The brand’s parent has since grown around it. The Associated Press reported on 27 June 2018 that Conagra, which already owned the Banquet, Healthy Choice and Alexia frozen brands, had agreed to buy Pinnacle Foods, owner of Birds Eye. Conagra announced on 26 October 2018 that the acquisition was complete. English Wikipedia notes one territorial exception to the brand’s ownership: in Australia, it says, the Healthy Choice name belongs to McCain Foods.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are sold in three familiar grocery formats: the frozen-meal carton, the cracker box and the coffee can or bag. Each format asks a package to do a different job. A frozen-meal carton has to read through the glass door of a freezer case, a cracker box sits upright in a long row on a dry-goods shelf, and a coffee can or bag is often bought out of habit and spotted by its colour before its name is read.

Because grocery names are often bought, sold and merged into larger food companies, the brand on the front of a package may outlast several owners, factories and redesigns. A recipe, a jingle or a colour can stay in place while the company behind it changes, which makes the plain questions worth asking: who started the name, who owns it now, and where the food or coffee is actually made.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Northbrook design office, a new symbol and a sitcom star directed by Christopher Guest.

The 2009 redesign is the Healthy Choice design project with a named studio. The New York Times reported that the new packaging came from the Northbrook, Illinois, office of Brandimage Desgrippes & Laga. The redesign, the paper said, was centred on a new brand symbol, an exclamation point, which Joan Chow said was meant to signal “surprisingly great taste.” Meatingplace reported that the exclamation-point logo would appear across the brand’s products, from Complete Meals and Select Entrées to Café Steamers, Fresh Mixers and soups.

The advertising for the same relaunch leaned on comedy. The Times said the commercials were made by the New York office of Nitro, starred the actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus and were directed by Christopher Guest. Their premise was that Louis-Dreyfus was not really sure she wanted to endorse Healthy Choice, and the spots ran as a series, echoing the episodic form of the sitcoms she was known for. The cast included Don Lake as her agent and Jane Lynch as a friend, both regulars in Guest’s films. Nitro’s president and chief creative officer, Kathy Delaney, called the device “a ‘meta’ thing” and said the brand “needed a shake-up.” The campaign’s digital work, including a revamped brand website and a special campaign site, was handled by Bridge Worldwide in Cincinnati, the Times reported.

The brand’s promotions have occasionally become news in their own right. In February 2000, the University of California, Davis, reported that one of its civil engineers, David Phillips, had noticed a Healthy Choice promotion in May 1999 that offered frequent-flier miles in exchange for bar-code labels from the brand’s products. Working through the range, he settled on its chocolate pudding cups, and the episode made him known in the press as the “Pudding Guy.”

For a design guide, Healthy Choice shows how a company-built name carries a whole aisle of products, and how a single added symbol can be used to re-launch a familiar brand without changing the name. Compare it with Lean Cuisine and Marie Callender’s, another Conagra freezer name. For this guide we use herb green, lemon gold and tray white with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Healthy Choice’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.