Industry: The Two-Minute Oven

Ten years ago microwave ovens seemed just the thing for everyone’s dream kitchen: roast beef cooked in 30 minutes, apple pie in 18, meat loaf in 13. But the ovens flopped: they were priced too high (well over $1,000), cost too much to repair, sometimes turned meat a bilious grey. Despite this, expensive microwave ovens are now back in force—this time not intended for everybody’s kitchen. Vastly improved small models are cooking up a storm in the nation’s restaurants.

No Leftovers. The microwave ovens will never take over in restaurants that consider a meal something of an art as well as very much of a commodity; they sell best where speed and convenience count more than cuisine. Many restaurants, hotels, motels, hospitals, factory cafeterias, railroad dining cars, snack bars and hamburger stands are now turning to high-speed electronic ovens —and the ovens are even being installed in vending machines that serve hot sandwiches. Such electronic giants as General Electric, Raytheon, Litton Industries and Tappan are in the field, competing with at least three smaller firms. Sales of the $6 million microwave-oven industry are still small, but will double this year and are expected by industry optimists to increase “several hundred percent” in the next ten years.

The revival of interest in microwave cooking comes from a new way of using the ovens. Instead of cooking and serving the food immediately, microwave users now quick-freeze the dishes after cooking them on conventional stoves and store them like TV dinners until the time comes to serve. The dishes are then popped into a microwave oven, which heats them in just a minute or two as high-frequency radar microwaves are absorbed by the food. Institutional users find the process ideal for low-cost assembly-line feeding.

Heat in Flight. Such restaurant chains as Stouffer, Howard Johnson, and Schrafft’s are using the ovens to heat precooked portions quickly; Manhattan’s La Fonda del Sol uses one to warm up tortillas. The newest Hilton hotels also have ultrasonic ovens to make their food service faster. Tad’s steak-house chain (eleven restaurants) has set up an experimental restaurant in Manhattan, where customers select complete meals from freezer chests, bring them to their tables and pop them into individual ovens that heat them up in about two minutes right by the tables. The chain plans to set up a string of these restaurants and prepare all its meals from one central commissary. Armour has begun to sell frozen meals designed for microwave ovens, and a Connecticut company, called Hager Inc., is turning out frozen “gourmet” meals for smaller restaurants that need invest in only one microwave oven (average cost: $1,800). Though most airlines bring hot food aboard in insulated cabinets, Pan American has put radar ovens in its planes, heats up frozen foods in flight.

Sometimes frozen dinners have cold spots that the microwaves miss; sometimes, too, French fries come out limp, and peas inexplicably explode. But the trend to microwave cooking is so decisive that manufacturers feel sure that such difficulties will soon be eliminated by new refinements.