Morton Frozen Foods

by Morton

1940 – 2000 GONE FOREVER

Gone — ConAgra shut the Crozet plant in 2000 and Morton has not been a going concern since. A fan campaign did talk ConAgra into testing a Morton chicken pot pie at Walmart in 2017; it went nowhere, and the brand is absent from the company's lineup today.

The budget end of the TV-dinner boom: foil trays and pot pies that fed American families through the 1950s and '60s at a price nobody else was willing to match. It began, improbably, as chicken and noodles in a glass jar.

🧾 One more thingHarold Morton started selling that jarred chicken-and-noodle dish in Louisville in 1940 and moved the operation into frozen food after the war, eventually making Morton one of the biggest names in the freezer case. ConAgra closed the Crozet, Virginia plant in 2000 and the brand went with it, after roughly half a century of national distribution.

Filed under: Frozen & Dairy · the ’70s & earlier

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