Imagine settling in, after a long day, to watch some of your favorite shows on Bravo, like Top Chef. It’s been a long day, remember, so while you watch talented chefs whip up savory, mouth-watering dishes, you shovel cold cereal into your mouth for dinner. What’s wrong with this picture?

According to Top Chef, a lot is wrong, but it has the solution. In partnership with Schwann’s Home Service—a 57-year-old food delivery company that specializes in providing frozen meals to rural customers—the brand is offering five Top Chef meals for $10–$12 each.

The target market consists of the same person we imagined in the opening paragraph: A busy consumer who has no time to cook but enjoys watching television. These consumers now can order meals similar to those prepared on their favorite shows, like Lee Anne Wong’s chicken in red curry sauce. To go with it, they can request a bottle of Top Chef–branded Quickfire Cabernet Sauvignon. And if they want to try their hand at cooking themselves, maybe on the weekends, the brand also provides a line of knives and other equipment.

Which of the meals are on offer? The meals offered are whichever ones the company chooses to market. Even if individual chefs created the recipes, they did so while filming Top Chef, which means the parent network Bravo owns all rights to the intellectual property, and the contestants receive none of the profits.

Discussion Questions:

1. List the main benefits of this partnership for the parties involved.

2. List some potential growth opportunities for this partnership

Joel Stein, “TV Dinners Get Literal,” Time, November 30, 2009.