The boxed meal helping Americans stay on budget
The Indicator from Planet Money
NPR
4.7 • 9.5K Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | NPR. |
| 0:02.0 | This is the indicator from Planet Money. |
| 0:13.4 | I'm Waylon Wong and I'm joined today by British business journalist Tala Visram. |
| 0:18.0 | Hi! |
| 0:19.0 | Hi, Waylon. Great to be here. Now, you are here today to talk about one of my favorite culinary inventions, and you've even got a clip from a classic ad. |
| 0:28.1 | What would you guys like? Hamburger helper. One pound, one pan. |
| 0:32.3 | A hamburger helper. This is always like a little treat when I was little, so it come in a box, right? |
| 0:38.4 | You have a seasoning packet. You've got some dried pasta. And then you throw it in a pan with |
| 0:43.4 | some ground beef and you got yourself a meal. Right. And hamburger helper sales have spiked in |
| 0:48.6 | recent months and I had to find out why. But first I had to find out what it actually was. I grew up |
| 0:54.0 | in the UK, so my childhood |
| 0:55.7 | was more Marmite and Ribina. I was joined on my sampling journey by a friend, Grayson Dangle. |
| 1:01.5 | What would the British hamburger help her be? Like Sunday roast or like a Yorkshire pudding |
| 1:07.3 | powder? Maybe add your own bangers. Yeah. But many Americans did grow up with it, including Grayson. |
| 1:14.0 | I feel like it was a weeknight thing, especially when me and my brother were a little, probably |
| 1:18.0 | when my mom was just like, let's get something quick. |
| 1:21.9 | Just two Brooklyn millennials casually sampling hamburger helper on a Monday morning, which is maybe more of an economic |
| 1:28.8 | indicator than anything. |
| 1:29.9 | I gotta start your week off right. |
| 1:32.0 | So today on the show, what is driving so many shoppers back to a nostalgic one box, |
| 1:38.2 | one pound, one pan meal? |
| 1:39.8 | Hamburger helper has become this meal for an anxious economic moment. |
... |
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