What material was the original TV Dinner tray made from?

The original TV Dinner tray was made from aluminum.

Aluminum made the early TV Dinner practical because it was lightweight, shaped into compartments and suitable for conventional oven heating. The tray held the turkey and side dishes separately, while an aluminum-foil covering sealed the meal during storage and cooking. Consumers could heat the entire package without transferring the food to another dish.

Swanson’s 1953 Thanksgiving-style meal was designed around this format, with turkey, cornbread stuffing, peas and sweet potatoes in individual sections. The arrangement echoed trays used for airline food service and also made the meal easy to carry and eat in front of a television.

A frequent mix-up is confusing the food tray with the later household TV tray table. The table was a separate piece of furniture, usually made from metal or other rigid materials. Another source of confusion is modern packaging: microwave-era frozen meals increasingly shifted to plastic or coated cardboard because bare metal cannot be used in a microwave oven. The original oven-heated format, however, used aluminum.