Hey, that’s just how I see it, and I certainly respect your right to be wrong. Go to the poll here on our home page and click off your response, and write to me. There may be a few SKUs out there that I haven’t tried yet, but most of the “restaurant-quality” items in the frozen food case wouldn’t make the cut at McDonald’s.

We’ve trained shoppers on price with BOGOs and 10-for-$10 sales, and at the same time, too many vendors have tripped on their own hype. “Our new restaurant-quality Acai fillets are upscale, artisan, organic and the most delicious foods of all time. And they’re a VALUE!”

Just who in their right mind would believe that? And don’t consumers already know that “VALUE!” means “CHEAP CRAP?” Somebody think of a new euphemism, okay? If an entire industry changed “Health and Beauty Aids” to “Health and Beauty Care” because a few nut cases worried about linking HBA with AIDS, we can do this.

About a week ago I was lamenting all this with Tim Tsao of Kahiki Foods. Tim’s not a guilty party here, and he’s actually smart enough to agree with me on most if not all of this. But he added another wrinkle. Remember that $30 restaurant meal you can’t get $6 for in the frozen department? Well, you can get $6 — easy — in the refrigerated department. Why is that? (Got any ideas?) We went round and round in circles on this for awhile, and the only conclusion I reached was that it was making me dizzy.

Yesterday, I was in Des Moines visiting with Ron Taylor, a senior VP of Hy-Vee. Ron basically agreed with where Tim and I were going, but he added yet another new wrinkle. We may have room for a bit of optimism here, he said, since frozen food quality has improved so greatly in the last few years. Well, that’s certainly true, even though the manufacturer hype has remained at Alice-in-Wonderland levels. Ron said he traces the quality improvement in frozen meals to about the time when quality refrigerated meals started taking off in the perimeter departments. It may have been the kick in the butt that frozen meal producers needed to improve their quality.

Hey, he could be right. So what do you think? Let me know, and I’ll either post your thoughts or weave them into this blog. Or, just tell me about whatever’s on your mind. This is a dialog, not a monolog. It will be updated weekly for now, and daily when I get enough single-malt stored away in the basement. You can contribute anonymously or under an assumed name if you prefer, so long as you’re not the CEO of Whole Foods.