Get ready for Ball Park Burgers.
Downers Grove-based Sara Lee is looking to expand its top-selling hot dog brand into more meats — and more male-bonding occasions.
The company will introduce frozen, pre-grilled burgers in the U.S. in March, with a suggested retail price of $8.29 for six burgers.
Aaron Alt, general manager for Ball Park brand at Sara Lee, said the company did “significant research” into the category, and consumer’s thoughts about Ball Park, and whether the brand could stretch into burgers. The leading insights, Alt said, were that “guy time is very important,” and “nothing completes it like guy food.”
Alt said the product has been designed for women to purchase and men to enjoy. While there are a variety of frozen patties on the market, Alt said the fully-cooked Ball Park patty, which can be microwaved in one minute, will be the only nationally-branded product of its kind.
A spokesman for SymphonyIRI, a Chicago-based market research firm, said sales of pre-cooked frozen hamburgers are currently too small to track.
Not everyone is enamored of the idea.
“Just because a company has financial, production and distribution wherewithal to do something, it doesn’t mean that they necessarily should,” Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, a New York-based marketing firm, adding that Sara Lee is asking consumers to take a big leap from the deli case to the freezer aisle, and from hot dogs to burgers. To illustrate the point that most brands can only stretch so far, he noted that Toyota had to develop the Lexus brand to be able to sell a luxury car.
Ball Park will try to gin up enthusiasm for the brand starting Saturday, with its first TV ad in four years from Seattle-based agency Publicis Groupe. The new tagline: “Men. Easier fed than understood.”
The first ad promotes Ball Park hot dogs, but Alt said subsequent spots will promote the burgers.
Ball Park burgers are already en route to some Sara Lee retailers, and are likely to be promoted in some in-store tastings as soon as February.
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