Clarence Birdseye: Father of Frozen Foods

People who thank the heavens every day for the convenience that is frozen foods should also thank the technology behind this miraculous invention. Every time you take that bag of frozen veggies or other frozen food from the freezer, you must give a little thanks to the visionary man, naturalist, and entrepreneur, and on top of that was the American inventor behind this great invention. He is Mr. Clarence Birdseye. Without him, you would not be enjoying the convenience of frozen foods. Although preserving Foods by the process of Freezing is not new and is used around the world for centuries. But, the process of freezing was amazingly revolutionized by Mr. Clarence Birdseye. He is also known as the “Father of Frozen Foods”.  

Who was Clarence Birdseye?

Clarence Birdseye was born on December 9, 1886, in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Montclair High School in New Jersey and was briefly a student at Amherst College but dropped out after two years due to a financial crisis. He moved out West to work for the United States Agriculture Department.

Clarence Birdseye began his career working as a taxidermist. He then obtained a position in Arizona and New Mexico as an assistant naturalist. This job required him to kill coyotes. He also worked with entomologist Willard Von Orsdel King in 1910 and 1911. Birdseye’s work involved trapping several hundred small mammals and King would remove ticks from them for research purposes. This research established that ticks were the cause of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

But his real glory starts in the year 1912, when he moved to Labrador in the dominion of Newfoundland (now in Canada) as a fur trapper and to carry out a fish and wildlife survey. He stayed until 1915. That was the time when he developed an interest in preserving and freezing food. From the Inuit (the indigenous people of the Arctic and Sub-arctic regions of North America, i.e., parts of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland) he learned how to ice fish underneath very thick ice layers. He found that given the -40^oC temperature, the fish was iced rapidly and tasted fresh when thawed. However, this was not the simple end of his queries about the invention.

Clarence Birdseye further noticed that meat or fish frozen in the early or late winter were not as good when frozen in the middle, and he wondered why. He would cut paper-thin slices and remark that the texture and taste of the food frozen during the full winter (the best freezing season) were far better than the one frozen in the dead of winter. Subsequently, Birdseye had figured out why. Looking at the inferior frozen food with its grainy texture and leaking juices, he realized that the ice crystals were too big, but when fish were quickly frozen, only a few small ice crystals formed, but the cell walls remained intact and they retained their freshness until they were thawed.

Clarence Birdseye’s invention: Flash Freezing Method 

In those days the freezing method used by the world was commonly performed at higher temperatures. The freezing process was therefore very Slow. Sometimes it took a day or longer to freeze. This caused the formation of large ice crystals in the food causing damage to the food tissues. But when freezing is done fast at 40 degrees below Zero degrees centigrade, very smaller ice crystals are formed and so less damage is done to food tissues. This is known as Fast Freezing.

In slow freezing methods on food, fluids leak from the cells, and this causes tissues to be damaged by the ice crystals and ultimately ruined the taste and texture of the food. This is why food that is frozen using the slow freezing method often has a mushy or dry feel to it. Quality horrible. The problem was that because of its bad reputation, the prices of frozen foods fetched the lowest prices and so had to be made from the cheapest and poorest quality fresh food.  To protect consumers from the consumption of terrible frozen foods, the State had to pass a law. New York even banned serving it in its prisons.

Clarence Birdseye’s scientific mind then wondered by seeing the effect of the rapid freezing process on the fish and other foods and eventually decided to use his newly acquired knowledge to establish a business.

In 1922, Birdseye began his journey in fish-freezing studies at the Clothel Refrigerating Company, and soon he established his own company and named it “Birdseye Seafoods Incorporated”. He was using extremely cold air, -43^oC in the freezing process to freeze fish fillets. But unfortunately, two years later, in 1924, his company become bankrupt. Even though Clarence Birdseye was determined towards his findings and remained focused in the process of improvisation. In that same year, he formulated a completely new commercially viable process; a “quick-freezing” process that involved packing fish inside cartons and then putting them between two refrigerated surfaces under pressure as cold as 50 degrees below zero to freeze. Birdseye called this product “frosted food” to differentiate it from low-quality frozen food. Once again, he started a new company called “General Seafood Corporation”.

In 1925, his new company moved to Gloucester Massachusetts where he made use of another invention. He called it the double belt freezer. In this process, he used Cold brine to chill two stainless steel belts at 50 degrees below zero that carried packaged fish which froze very quickly. His process was patented in the US vide #1,773,079. This was the beginning of the flourishing frozen foods industry. These new machines cooled foods even more quickly so that only the smallest ice crystals formed in the food and thus cell membranes did not endure any damage. In 1927, Clarence Birdseye extended the process beyond fish and started flash-freezing other food items, that is vegetables, chicken, meat, and fruits.

Beyond invention, Clarence Birdseye never achieved much success in his life commercially. One industry analysis wrote, “since the grocer had no low-temperature storage facilities, he had to invest $1200 to $2000 for a specially built refrigerated cabinet. No national and practically no local advertising was done, and his customers not only did not demand quick-frozen foods but probably had never heard of them. The retail grocer who had put in an expensive storage case found that it is cost and maintenance amounted to a burdensome charge against his profits, and if he had fresh food and vegetables and meat departments, he was competing with these departments. He saw no reason for spending time and money in advertising and developing consumer preference for this new food line”.

That’s why Birdseye’s company was facing difficulty to penetrate in the market and ultimately was running out of money. He, therefore, sold his company to Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation and Postum Cereal Company, Inc in 1929 together with his patents. They eventually established a new business, General Foods, which founded the “Birds Eye Frozen Food Company”. Clarence Birdseye still worked as a consultant for the company and continued inventing newer and better-frozen food technology. The new management soon realized that distribution is the most serious problem for the quick-frozen food industry, and therefore they need an immediate solution to it.

Now they decided that the company would not only make the food but also the freezers and the trucks. Then they will lease them to retailers as a measure to establish the concept of frozen foods in the market for their products. These efforts worked miraculously and by the end of 1937, almost 2000 stores had started keeping Birdseye’s Frozen product. Also, the company closely monitored the marketing of its products and remained focused on their freshness and convenience. Despite that still, there were major hurdles in growing the frozen food market in the US.

Somewhere a study shows that in 1937, around 23 percent of American homes had electric refrigerators, and according to American Heritage, in 1945, Americans still bought less than two pounds of frozen food apiece. But Clarence Birdseye believed in frozen food. That same year in an interview he told the Washington Post “I believe we’ll see a phenomenal increase in the demands for both home and commercial use”. And he was right. The subsequent rapid expansion of the frozen food industry was part of the consumer boom of the 1950s, during which more and more people bought new refrigerators and freezers. But no less important were the cultural shifts.

The 1950s and the ‘60s are called “the golden age of food processing”. Consumers who had been deprived of consumer goods through the 1930s and the ‘40s, with the war and food rationing suddenly have disposable income. The country become very wealthy, and all these products started flooding the market. In less than a decade, frozen food sales grew from merely $496 million to almost $2 billion. It was the fastest-growing segment of the food industry. But possibly the biggest shift was when families started to move to the suburbs. Now they could drive to the supermarket, buy a ton of food and store it all in their refrigerator, which had a freezer built in then.

In 1955, The New York Times wrote “Frozen foods are no longer a specialty item, but an integral part of the Grocery Business. We can say that the brilliance and the absurdity of Birdseye’s invention were that it worked very well, but it was engineered way before retailers or consumers were ready for it, or even wanted it. It took two decades and a world war to catch on. But today frozen foods are cemented into America and many other Societies around the world”. 

Birds Eye Brand in Modern Days

In November 1985, General Food was acquired by the Philip Morris Companies (now Altria Group, Inc.) and it was then merged into Kraft Foods Inc. in 1990. Birds Eye was sold to Dean Foods in 1993 and was independently owned by Birds Eye Foods of Rochester, New York until it was purchased by Pinnacle Foods, Inc of Parsippany, New Jersey, in 2009. Pinnacle Foods was then acquired by Conagra Brands, Inc. in June 2018 (the sale deal was completed on October 26, 2018), with Birds Eye becoming part of its brand portfolio. Since then they are managing the Birds Eye brand in the U.S.

Since the late 1930s Unilever Group was managing the Birds Eye brand in the UK and Ireland markets. However, in other parts of Europe, they were selling frozen food products under the brand name “Iglo”. On August 28, 2006, private equity house, Permira acquired the Birds Eye and Iglo businesses from Unilever for £1.7bn, forming the BirdsEye Iglo Group. In 2010 this Group further acquired the Italian frozen food business “Compagnia Surgelati Italiana SPA” from Unilever for €0.8bn, and reunited the Findus brand in Sweden into the group. On 24 June 2011 BirdsEye Iglo Group became Iglo Foods Group Limited and started trading as the Iglo Group. On April 20, 2015, Permira announced their definite sale agreement deal with Nomad Holdings Limited (Nomad) for €2.6bn for Iglo Group. Since then Nomad is managing the brand in Europe. 

The Birds Eye brand in Australia and New Zealand is owned by Simplot Australia Pty Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the J.R. Simplot Company.

When Clarence Birdseye died?

After seeing so many ups and downs, there has been a rapid growth in sales of frozen foods due to great consumer satisfaction, year-round availability, and the general convenience that frozen food products bring to the average consumer. Today, the global frozen food market is estimated at around $232.42 billion and is expected to reach $376.95 billion by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.3%. Modern-day Freezing Process technology used in Food preservation has received its inspiration from Clarence Birdseye. The person who devoted most of his life to struggling to establish quality Frozen Food died on 7 October 1956 at the Gramercy Park Hotel aged 69 in a heart attack. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea just off the area in Gloucester Massachusetts.

Photo: unrevs