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Trying to Bolster the Image of Frozen Meals as Sales Lag

In a Stouffer’s ad, a daughter likes her lasagna so much that she ignores her smartphone.

A NEW campaign is trying to reverse the declining sales of frozen meals in recent years.

Total sales in the United States were $8.04 billion in 2013, compared with $8.48 billion in 2008, a drop of 5 percent, according to Mintel, a market research firm.

Stouffer’s, a Nestlé brand, is introducing a series of commercials that aim to shift the perception among some consumers that processed frozen meals are not as tasty or nutritious as freshly prepared meals.

The commercials feature families gathered around dinner tables. One spot opens with a teenage girl (Holly Taylor, who appears in “The Americans” on the FX network), reading a text message as she absent-mindedly puts a forkful of lasagna into her mouth. As she tastes it, her eyes widen and she places her phone on the table.

“As Katie puts her cellphone down for the first time all week,” says a voice-over, “she realizes that Stouffer’s lasagna is topped with fresh cheese that browns beautifully.”

Images of melted cheese bubbling atop lasagna, mozzarella being grated and a curl of aged Parmesan being shaved from a wheel of cheese are interspersed with shots of the girl chewing appreciatively.

The voice-over and up-tempo music stop, and there is a close-up shot of the phone, which buzzes. The camera draws back to reveal Katie’s parents, who are also at the table, looking expectantly at the buzzing phone, which, to their astonishment, their daughter ignores.

As the family contentedly eats together, the voice-over says the tagline for the new campaign, “Made for you to love.”

Other spots are variations on the theme: In one, a girl breathlessly telling her parents a story that goes on and on takes a bite of macaroni and cheese, finally takes a long breath and goes silent; in another, two brothers who have been tussling reach a truce brought about by lasagna.

The commercials, which will be introduced on Friday, are by JWT, New York, part of WPP, with the live action directed by Lena Beug and food scenes directed by Margaret Elman and Joy Kilpatrick. Stouffer’s, which declined to reveal the advertising budget for the campaign, spent $36.5 million on advertising in 2013, up from $27.7 million in 2012, according to Kantar Media, a unit of WPP.

Tom Moe, the director of marketing at Stouffer’s, said that, like other brands — including Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine — the original Stouffer’s is “facing challenges” when it comes to revenue.

Those challenges “are primarily being driven by consumer misperceptions over the quality and nutrition that our frozen meals offer,” Mr. Moe said. “We need to educate the people about what frozen meals can offer in terms of ingredient quality and the nutrition profile of our meals.”

While showing ingredients like real cheese in an appetizing way demonstrates that Stouffer’s is using the same ingredients that are used in home kitchens, the family vignettes with children more interested at the dinner table strike an emotional chord, Mr. Moe said.

“Stouffer’s enters the scene in a way that is impactful because somebody has gone from a moment of being mesmerized by something else to, all of the sudden, completely in the moment,” Mr. Moe said.

“It’s about juxtaposing the surprising care that goes into making Stouffer’s and just the amazing love that people and families get out of it,” said Eric Weisberg, executive creative director of JWT New York. “Stouffer’s has been sort of this classic, warm brand, but what this campaign does is it connects it with modern families and the modern condition in a way that makes those ingredients and that food more relevant than ever before.”

Many blogs and websites have noted what can be the incongruity between the way frozen meals appear in photographs on their packages and the way they look coming out of the microwave.

An acerbic 2012 post on diet frozen meals on Jezebel that drew more than 1.2 million views, for example, included a Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine chicken carbonara, which emerging from the microwave bore little resemblance to the appetizing photo on the package.

A 2013 Huffington Post taste test panel rated Stouffer’s fourth out of 10 frozen macaroni and cheese varieties, behind Trader Joe’s, Trader Joe’s Reduced Fat and Amy’s. The website also tested 14 frozen lasagnas, rating the Stouffer’s Italiano variety third (behind Trader Joe’s and Amy’s again), its five-cheese variety 10th and its meat sauce variety 12th.

So that consumers can try Stouffer’s products for themselves, for the second consecutive year Nestlé will dispatch a food truck carrying the Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese logo on what the company calls a mobile food tour. Free samples will be served, often with the macaroni and cheese dressed up with additions like Tabasco sauce and bacon, serving suggestions that Stouffer’s also makes to consumers.

The tour will begin this month in Los Angeles, where the truck will remain through June before driving east, with the rest of its itinerary to be determined.

“There’s a lot of credibility with what food trucks bring to the table these days,” Mr. Moe of Stouffer’s said. “For us, it’s an occasion to get outside of the box so that we can demonstrate to people on the street that we’re made just the way that you’d make it in your own kitchen.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Trying to Bolster the Image of Frozen Meals as Sales Lag. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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