Personal cooking skills aside, being able to buy that chicken or roast, take it home, put it in the oven and cook it without ever removing it from its package sounds so … so easy. Yet, recently a long-time industry insider told me that he estimates the entire ovenable materials market in the U.S. is pretty small; probably not much more than $10 million. How this can be is a mystery since most folks like “no-brainer” cooking, especially if they can’t mess it up.
Apparently, it’s not really a demand issue as much as it’s a technical packaging hurdle. High-temperature cooking materials require high sealing temperatures. Consistently maintaining high enough sealing temperatures and meeting throughput targets creates some significant rework problems for processors. Anecdotal reports place rework at 10 percent or higher sometimes.