ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the challenges of modern food manufacturing from the perspective of a product manager in the marketing department of a Norwegian food company. In Norway, as in most of Western Europe and North America, food is abundant, consumers affluent and few go hungry. The transfer of labor from the domestic to the industrial sphere represents one of the main reasons for the construction of value-added products in industrialized societies. The case that is about to unfold took place in the early 1990s in the marketing department of Viking Foods, one of the largest private food manufacturers in Norway, the market leader in the field of frozen convenience foods. The strong emphasis on dishes of foreign origin, and particularly on Italian pasta dishes, reflected a general tendency during the 1990s associating convenience foods with foods of foreign origin.
