Carl Paul Gottfried Linde, an engineer, scientist, and professor at the Technical University of Munich helped pioneer industrial cooling, through what is commonly known as the Hampson-Linde cycle, and used his findings to plan an ice and refrigeration machine back in the nineteenth century. Linde’s desire to build such machines was furthered in 1892, when the Guinness Brewery requested that Linde create a carbon dioxide liquefaction plant for them.
The first “complete” frozen meal was not the 'TV dinner', it was airplane food. In 1945, Maxson Food Systems, Inc. starting making its 'Strato-Plates', meals that were created specifically for consumption on airplanes. Each frozen meal included a meat, vegetable, and potato, and was meant to be reheated for in-air eating.
Swanson’s, which is widely hailed as the true creator of TV dinners, coined the name and was the most well-known maker of compartmentalized meals in the 1950s.
Conagra Foods introduced its Healthy Choice line of frozen food in 1989, after the corporation was inspired to pursue healthy frozen picks after its chairman, Charles Harper, suffered a heart attack due to his bad eating habits.
There has long been a debate over which company first introduced the frozen pizza to the grocery store market, with both Totino’s and Tombstone vying for the title. However, the Celentano brothers, who owned their own Italian specialty store in New Jersey, are believed to have marketed the first frozen pizza in 1957.