Slim-Fast

Slim-Fast began in July 1977 as a product of the Thompson Medical Company, the business S. Daniel Abraham had built after leaving the Army in 1945 by buying an itch-relief cream, and its maker, for $5,000. Abraham had been in the diet trade since Slim-Mint gum in 1956, and his Dexatrim pill had become the best-selling diet pill on the market. The new product was a powder that, mixed with low-fat milk, took on the taste and texture of a milkshake: a 1,200-calorie-a-day plan built around replacing breakfast and lunch and then eating a sensible dinner. It barely survived its first year. After almost sixty dieters died on 300-calorie-a-day liquid diets made by other manufacturers, Slim-Fast was pulled from circulation along with every other fluid meal replacement, and it did not come back until the early 1980s.

The comeback turned into a phenomenon at the end of the decade, when Tommy Lasorda, the Los Angeles Dodgers manager with a legendary appetite who once bragged of eating 500 oysters in three days, became the first famous face to pitch the shakes. By the company history's account, Slim-Fast wanted a celebrity to answer Oprah Winfrey's promotion of the rival Optifast, and offered $20,000 to Lasorda's favorite charity if he stuck to the plan. He lost almost 30 pounds within months, a group of Nashville nuns got a new convent in his name, and the company's research found women trusted him precisely because he was a man admitting to a weight problem on national television. The product his campaign made famous was Ultra Slim-Fast.

In the early 1990s Abraham spun Slim-Fast off from Thompson Medical as its own company, and it promptly hit a slump, partly because Oprah's widely publicized weight regain after a liquid diet soured the public on the whole category. The answer was to sell a "Slim-Fast way of life": pre-mixed shakes in cans and refrigerated cartons, hot chocolate, frozen entrees and desserts made by ConAgra, cheese curls and popcorn made with Borden, and new testimonial spots from Lasorda, Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford, Ed Koch and Mel Tormé. In 1992 Slim-Fast held 70 percent of the meal-replacement market and cut its wholesale prices by an average of 55 cents to squeeze the competition, and the next year it ran a talk-show-style infomercial that sold nothing at all, only sent viewers to the store.

The spending kept climbing: more than $46 million budgeted for advertising in 1996, a $10 million campaign in 1997 for Jump Start, which promised five pounds in five days, and $60 million in 1999 to launch its meal bars. That year Slim-Fast sold more than $611 million worth of product and held 46 percent of the diet liquid-and-powder segment. The plan boiled down to the line everyone still remembers: a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and a sensible dinner. In April 2000 Unilever agreed to buy the company in a $2.3 billion deal, at the same time it bought Ben & Jerry's.

Then the low-carb wave arrived. Atkins and South Beach cut into Slim-Fast's revenues, and its 2003 sales fell by 21 percent. The company recalled all of its canned drinks in December 2009 over possible bacterial contamination, and in 2011 it stopped making cans altogether and moved to plastic bottles. Unilever sold the brand to Kainos Capital in 2014, Glanbia bought it in 2018, and in September 2025 the Splenda maker Heartland Food Products Group bought the American brand, with the UK and European business sold off separately a month later. The shakes are still sold.