How Long Does it Take to Thaw a Fresh Turkey?

The gang at Upright is looking forward to sharing Thanksgiving with family and friends, and we wish all of you a safe and joyful holiday!

For those of you who may be doing the cooking this year, we wanted to make sure you knew about a pretty handy resource – the Turkey Talk-Line®. For over 30 years, the turkey experts at Butterball have operated a toll-free hotline offering on-demand advice and assistance for meal preparers throughout the country. Established in 1981, you could say that the Turkey Talk-Line® was somewhat ahead of its time as an interactive marketing tool.

The hotline has been tremendously successful for Butterball. In their first year, a team of six “home economists” answered 11,000 turkey preparation questions throughout the entire holiday season. Today, a much larger team handles 12,000 calls on Thanksgiving day alone, and the phone experts must undergo  training at Butterball University to learn all of the right tips and tricks.  This year, for the first time, the team of turkey experts will include men.

Not resting on the success of their hotline, Butterball has expanded its efforts with a variety of social media tools, including Facebook and Pinterest pages for “Turketarians.” On the Butterball website you will find an online portion calculator and a free smart phone app as well as recipes , how to videos, coupons and more. Butterball is a great example of a brand/business that found a successful way to connect with its customers, but did not stop there. They have done a great job of finding ways through online marketing to expand their success and stay on the minds of consumers.

On a final, and humorous note, there have been many accounts of some of the more absurd (but real) questions callers to the Butterball line have asked, including, ‘how long does it take to thaw a fresh turkey?’. You can find more examples in this Reader’s Digest slideshow and in this video, during which an operator shares her experiences.

Happy Thanksgiving!