Sotto Terra: Bloggers Get Frozen Dinners in ConAgra Bait & Switch

by Jordan Yerman | September 7, 2011 at 09:25 am

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Food Bloggers Tricked into Marie Callender's TV Dinner Focus Group

Several prominent food bloggers were invited to a Greenwich Village brownstone to met celebrity chef George Duran and "supermarket guru" Phil Lempert. There, the bloggers were told, they would get a taste of custom cuisine from an underground restaurant that would be open for only five days.

However, what the bloggers, as well as the guests who won online competitions to attend, got instead were frozen TV dinners from Marie Callender's. This is not a joke. This really happened.

Frozen-Dinner Bait & Switch

Basically, George Duran and Phil Lempert spent the evening touting the value of fresh ingredients as they fed their guests chemical-filled frozen dinners.

The whole stunt was meant to provide hidden-camera footage for a viral video ad campaign for ConAgra's line of Marie Callender's frozen meals. The event was managed by a PR firm called Ketchum.

Cindy Zhou tells the entire story on her blog, Chubby Chinese Girl., summing it up with " I'm NOT their target consumer and they were totally off by thinking I would buy or promote their highly processed frozen foods after tricking me to taste it."

Food Mayhem tore into George Duran, saying, " You sir are an embarrassment to those in the culinary industry working hard to maintain and enhance a culture of food as one of the best parts of living."

Not only had these food bloggers, whose reputations are based on steering their readers in the right direction, fooled, but their guests had their time wasted as well. There were two tiers of egg-on-face.

A spokesperson for ConAgra said that deception was not the company's intention:

“It was never our intention to put any bloggers or their guests in an uncomfortable position and for that we are sorry,” she said, adding that the brand subsequently offered to reimburse attendees for such expenses as cab fare and baby-sitting.

Except that that's bullshit. Deception was ConAgra's explicit intention. The company's grievous mistake was in thinking that food bloggers who focus on healthy and organic eating wouldn't turn on the company that fed them TV dinners.

It's unclear how ConAgra and Ketchum could have thought that this fiasco would have ended any other way. As for the Marie Callender's brand, who cares? Foodies do not constitute its target market. George Duran's and Phil Lempert's credibilities, though, took a bit of a hit, as did Ketchum's.

As Bas Rutten says while banging a guy's head into a table, "Don't you ever do this!"