Birdseye, Clarence

(1886-1956)
General Seafood Corporation

Overview

Billionaire scientist and inventor Clarence Birdseye was not the first person to preserve fresh food by freezing it for later consumption; in the early seventeenth century, English philosopher–statesman Francis Bacon had experimented with stuffing chickens with snow. As early as 1908, West Coast growers routinely froze their fruits, using what was known as a "cold–pack" process (freezing drums of sugared fruit and berries in an ice–salt mixture), to preserve them for storing and shipping (mostly by rail) to distant markets. During the same period, East Coast users of the cold–pack process included ice cream manufacturers and "New York dressed" (cold storage) chicken and fish wholesalers.

Yet it is Birdseye who is considered the father of frozen foods, and his Birds Eye Frosted Foods Company—along with the discovery of household refrigeration—changed the world's food industry forever. Birdseye's personal contributions to the industry were two–fold. First, he perfected a rapid method for freezing foods that preserved their cellular structure and composition, thus retaining their freshness, taste, and vitamin content. Second, he was the first to package frozen foods to be sold directly to the end–user, or consumer market.

Personal Life

Birdseye was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Clarence Frank Birdseye, lawyer and legal scholar, and Ada Underwood. As a young boy, Birdseye already had developed a keen interest in natural history. At the age of five, Birdseye gave his mother a mouse skin that he had dressed. Before he reached his teens, his proficiency in taxidermy led him to insert an advertisement in a sporting magazine offering instruction in the art, under the auspices of the American School of Taxidermy. At Montclair, New Jersey, where he attended high school, his other enduring interest, food preparation, came to light when he enrolled in the cooking class.

Following a family tradition, Birdseye entered Amherst College with the class of 1910 (majoring in biology), but financial difficulties adversely affected his attendance, and he did not graduate. Nonetheless, during his tenure there, his imaginative schemes for meeting college expenses included the sale of frogs to the Bronx Zoo for snake food and the live trapping of 135 specimens of the comparatively rare black rat for a Columbia University professor's breeding experiments.

From 1910 to 1912, Birdseye was a field naturalist for the Biological Survey of the United States Department of Agriculture, work that led to his publication of a short monograph entitled "Some Common Mammals of Western Montana in Relation to Agriculture and Spotted Fever" (1912). A successful venture in marketing western furs during this period took him in 1912 to Labrador, Newfoundland, where he was associated for a time with the medical missionary Sir Wilfred Grenfell. Birdseye traded in furs in Labrador for the next five years.

During a visit to the United States, Birdseye married Eleanor Gannett on August 21, 1915; the couple had four children. In 1916 he returned to Labrador with his wife and their infant son. His changed domestic circumstances drew Birdseye's attention to the problems of food preservation. An avid fisherman, Birdseye preserved his catches in snow in the sub–zero winds. Impressed with the flavor and freshness of his frozen fish upon thawing them out—as though they had just been caught—Birdseye started to experiment with other indigenous species such as caribou and rabbit. He discovered that the meat from these animals, if frozen quickly and deeply, also retained its freshness and flavor until thawed out weeks later.

After perfecting a mechanical quick–freeze method for preserving food that would simulate the natural sub–zero climate he found in Labrador, Birdseye started his own company in New York in 1922, freezing fish fillets. Over the next several decades, his name and the Birds Eye logo became synonymous with retail frozen foods, in much the same way as the word "Kleenex" was used to indicate facial tissues.

Although his process ultimately made Birdseye very wealthy, he continued to work for his entire life. His last project (1953–1955) took him to Peru on an assignment to develop a new method of making paper stock from bagasse (crushed sugarcane stalks). While there, he suffered a heart attack that he attributed to the high altitude. He never fully recovered and died the following year in New York City.

Birdseye was a hands–on inventor and experimenter in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. He was an original thinker and investigator, gifted with keen powers of observation and an enormous curiosity. He was also a capable businessman who held some 300 American and foreign patents. His early interest in the natural world never carried over into the business world but became a lifelong avocation nonetheless. Near the end of his life, he was coauthor with his wife of Growing Woodland Plants (1951).

Career Details

World War I had interrupted Birdseye's search for a commercial application of his findings. After returning to the United States, he became the purchasing agent for the United States Housing Corporation (1917–1919) and assistant to the president of the United States Fisheries Association (1920–1922). In 1922 he resumed his experiments with quick–freezing, establishing himself in the corner of an icehouse in New Jersey. Encouraged, he formed Birdseye Seafoods, Inc., in New York, with a $20,000 stock subscription. His own capital investment consisted of $7 for an electric fan, buckets of brine, and cakes of ice. The first successful product was dressed fillets of haddock, frozen brick–hard in square containers made from old candy boxes. However, the general public proved disinterested, confusing his product with regular "cold storage" fish. Families were disinclined to know the detailed effects of scientific freezing upon the microscopic cellular composition of fish tissue and the benefits thereof, and soon his new company went bankrupt.

Undaunted, Birdseye started a new company, General Seafoods Corporation, with a $60,000 stock exchange in 1924. Located near a reliable source of fresh fish in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the company also housed laboratories for research and development. With a small group of associates, Birdseye perfected his novel process for quick–freezing, which consisted of packing dressed fish in cartons, then freezing the contents between two refrigerated surfaces under pressure (the "double–belt freezer," which later used refrigerated metal plates) that allowed the heat exchange to be accomplished directly and evenly upon the foods. By 1928 he was able to apply the technique to meat, poultry, fish, and shellfish in commercial quantities. He coined the word "quick–freeze," and referred to his products as "frosted foods." The missing element, public acceptance, appeared after 1929. In that year the Postum Company, skilled in the distribution of consumer food products, together with the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation, acquired all patents and assets of Birdseye's company for a reported $22 million ($20 million for the patents and $2 million for the assets). Subsequently, the Postum Company purchased the Goldman Sachs interest and adopted the name General Foods.

In the 1940s, Birdseye invented a machine capable of quick–freezing loose vegetables individually and a process for preserving foods by quick–drying that he called the "anhydrous method." Neither was developed commercially. He also invented a reflector, an infrared heat lamp and a recoilless harpoon gun.

Social and Economic Impact

The scientific principle of freezing foods was already known when Birdseye began his first experiments. However, he was able to perfect and then apply this principle to consumer needs, thus bringing about the birth of the retail frozen food industry. Timing was perfect: his "frosted foods" market coincided with both the development of home refrigeration and freezing units, as well as with the onset of the Great Depression (1929), during which time the preservation of food for future use became of paramount importance. Of additional importance was the new availability of frozen fruits and vegetables on a year–round basis nationwide—previously available only during the harvesting season (with the exception of states where year–round growing occurred, such as in California) unless canned or bottled for later use.

Chronology: Clarence Birdseye

1886: Born in Brooklyn, New York.

1910: Attended Amherst College.

1912: Traded furs in Labrador, Newfoundland.

1922: Founded Birdseye Seafood Inc.

1924: Developed quick–freeze process for freezing food; founded General Seafood Corporation.

1928: Developed the double–belt freezer.

1929: Sold patents and assets and became the frozen food division of General Foods Corporation.

1930: Birds Eye Frosted Foods appeared in retail markets, creating the birth of the retail frozen food industry.

1934: Birds Eye Frosted Food contracted with American Radiator Corporation to provide retail frozen food display cases.

1956: Died in New York City.

Parallel in time, during the 1920s, farmers represented 27 percent of the population, and hydroponics (the growing of plants in water) had been invented. The U.S. Department of Agriculture created the Bureaus of Home Economics and Dairying during these years. Interest in the preservation of surplus crops and meats heightened on a commercial level but had not yet trickled down to the end–users, or consumers. Families began purchasing refrigerators during the 1920s, just as facilities for transporting, storing, and displaying the frozen foods were being developed. An article appearing in the September 1929 issue of the Ladies' Home Journal, entitled "A New Food Vision," featured a photograph of Birdseye's belt freezer and speculated what the food stores of the future would look like.

With the onset of the depression later in 1929, Birds Eye eased the burden and kept the growth trend continuing by contracting with a commercial credit company to finance retailer display cases, allowing grocers to make monthly installments on the equipment. In 1934, Birds Eye contracted with the American Radiator Corporation to manufacture cost–effective freezer display cases for local grocery markets and leased them to retailers for approximately eight dollars a month. Articles and recipes devoted to the new trend in frozen foods began to appear regularly in The Times and other publications. By 1943 food writer Clementine Paddleford described the variety of quick–frozen, box–packed meals as "wartime savers of storage and shipping space." For those who could not afford free–standing home freezers (old–fashioned iceboxes were still common through the 1940s), another article promoted the rental of neighborhood frozen–food lockers for storing freezer foods. (The mass production of free–standing home freezers was put on hold during World War II but resumed on a large scale in the 1950s, coinciding with the introduction of frozen "TV dinners.")

The new technology created a competitive market, and, according to Paddleford, 60 varieties of frozen food were available to the public in 1943, packed by 140 companies and sold under 72 brands in 30,000 stores across 48 states. Advertisements from that period show that Penguin brand "frozen–fresh" peas sold for 21 cents, while Birds Eye brand frozen cherries sold for 30 cents. Exulted Paddleford in a 1943 Times article, "cardboard and plastic film are all it takes," to package one million pounds of frozen peas, whereas "some 269,196 pounds of steel and tin" were required to store the same amount of peas in cans. These were important considerations during the wartime years, not to mention the improved taste and freshness of the frozen foods, compared to the canned ones. In 1944, Birds Eye had leased the first insulated railroad cars designed to transport food nationwide. The refrigerated shipping industry was thus born. Within a few years, quick–frozen foods had revolutionized food distribution and had brought about sweeping changes in national eating habits. Additionally, it had effected fundamental improvements in American agriculture through stimulating the seed industry to refine varieties for quick–frozen products, introducing quality controls in field production and stabilizing prices, which brought millions of acres of farmland into more profitable use.

Although Birdseye died in 1956, he lived long enough to appreciate the thriving success of his revolutionary ideas. His company remained at the forefront of frozen food technology, being the first to offer foil overwraps on boxed vegetables, which held moisture ten times better than waxed paper, and also was the first to introduce vegetables and sauces to which meat was added, for the health–conscious consumers. Since the mid–1990s, Birds Eye has introduced 57 new items on the frozen food market, and the familiar "Birds Eye" logo remains prominent in both small groceries and supermarkets worldwide.

Sources of Information

Bibliography

"A Man Named Birdseye." 23 November 2001. Available at http://www.birdseye.com.

Bernstein, Leilah. "Times Past." Los Angeles Times, 24 January 2001.

Flatow, Ira. "Analysis: History and properties of absolute zero; experiments and discoveries relating to the science of cold and freezing." Talk of the Nation/Science Friday (NPR), 14 January 2000.

Hoffman, Gene. "Visit with Clarence Spurs Insights into Frozens' Future." Frozen Food Age, October 1999.

"In the Beginning." Frozen Food Age, August 1997.

Stelljes, Kathryn Barry. "Timeline: A Legacy of Research." Agricultural Research, December 1999.