Clarence Birdseye

For more information on Clarence Birdseye, visit Britannica.com.

There really was a Clarence Birdseye (1886-1956).If he hadn't visited the Arctic, there may never havebeen frozen TV dinners. Now he is recognized as amajor innovator in the food industry.

As a young scientist working in the frozen North, it didn't surprise Birdseye to note that freshly caught fish, when placed on the Arctic ice and exposed to the wind, immediately froze solid. What did surprise Birds-eye was that the fish, if thawed and eaten much later, retained all of its fresh characteristics. This discovery was to create a new food industry and make Birdseye a millionaire. The youthful Birdseye had the courage to thaw out the rock hard fish weeks later and cook them for dinner, as an experiment. At the time, this was a real risk. He could have become very ill by eating "rotten" fish; but he didn't. Instead, the young naturalist found that the fish tasted almost the same as if they had been fresh, and with the same texture.

Clarence Birdseye was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 9, 1886. He attended Amherst College, with the intention of becoming a biologist. But he didn't graduate. Instead, he went to work for the U.S. Biological Survey as a field naturalist. His supervisors sent him to the Arctic to do research on the ways of the native Americans who lived there, and even to trade some furs.

The combination of ice, wind, and low temperatures in the Arctic froze anything left exposed almost instantly. Birdseye soon realized that such quick freezing of certain foods kept large crystals from forming. Slow freezing attempts had resulted in the formation of large crystals, transforming the food so that it could never be eaten. But if the freezing was accomplished quickly enough, there was no damage to the cellular structure of the food.

As a young scientist, Birdseye was making notes on his fascinating discovery. He also realized that he had the germ of a new business that could be very profitable. Throughout his life, Birdseye was a skilled businessman. He did more than create the modern frozen food industry. He also obtained almost 300 patents for various inventions, many of them in the fields of incandescent lighting, wood pulping, and infrared heating.

Birdseye Seafoods was Born

Birdseye knew that he had discovered something very important, but he wasn't certain what. All he knew for sure was that he had the beginnings of what could be a very profitable business. A careful man, he continued to work in various federal departments from 1917 to 1925, while perfecting his freezing methods. All the time he knew that the public would clamor to pay for all the various types of foods they could enjoy if they didn't have to be obtained fresh. He knew that frozen foods would be in demand if he could figure out exactly how to accomplish the freezing.

In September 1922, while still employed by the government, Birdseye returned to New York City and formed his own company, Birdseye Seafoods, Inc. The company was far from an immediate success, as Birdseye continued his experiments with fish filets. He would freeze them, then thaw them, at his plant headquarters near the Fulton Fish Market in New York. He didn't have to eat every experiment because he already knew that the food would be safe to eat. He was trying to perfect a way to ensure the flavor and texture of the food.

The Final Secret

At last Birdseye discovered the secret to safely freezing food. After two years of experimentation, he tried wax-packing dressed fish and other foods in cartons then freezing them between two flat, refrigerated surfaces under pressure. The "double plate" freezer was the solution. This technique quickly froze the foods solid with almost no damage at all to their cellular structure. Foods packaged and frozen in this new way were almost exactly the same when thawed weeks or months later. Birdseye quickly applied for, and was granted, a patent on the exclusive method.

Birdseye knew he had found the answer to safely preserving foods for an indefinite time, an answer that could make him a fortune. With this new technique safely patented, he decided to form another company. On July 3, 1924, he formed the General Seafood Corporation with some rich partners who believed in his process.

General Seafood was the beginning of a food industry that has since become massive. A look in the refrigerated section of any local grocery store will reveal a stunning variety of delicious frozen foods. There will be many types of fish, the food item that started it all, and dozens of meat and poultry foods as well as French fried potatoes, milkshakes, and complete breakfasts and dinners. There are even pizza combinations and other specialty frozen foods waiting for consumers. Recently, chain hamburger and hot dog companies began supplying their products in frozen form to supermarkets. This huge industry began with the discoveries of Clarence Birdseye.

Birdseye was a hard worker who was always thinking of new ideas. Even as he was perfecting his freezing techniques, he was also working on other food items. In the late 1930s, he perfected and patented a new food dehydrating process. However, he was so busy with his frozen food ideas that he didn't begin marketing the dehydrating idea until 1946.

Birdseye Built a Successful Company

Company success didn't happen overnight. The first retail sale of frozen foods occurred on March 6, 1930, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Birdseye called it the "Springfield Experiment Test Market." In his frozen food cases he included 26 different types of fish, meat, fruit, and vegetables. He posted a number of rather questionable signs on the frozen food display with words like "50 Below Zero," but people bought the new items. They loved the idea that they could take home, thaw, and eat foods that were otherwise not available to them at a reasonable price.

Premature thawing continued, however, to be a problem. Birdseye contacted the American Radiator Corporation. This company agreed to manufacture low-temperature retail display units that would hold the frozen food in markets. Markets agreed to display only Birds Eye products. In return, they were able to lease the units for about eight dollars per month. The new units would keep the foods solidly frozen until customers bought them.

Always on the lookout for ways to expand his business, Birdseye began to lease insulated railroad cars in 1944. These cars were specially designed for the nationwide shipment of his frozen food products. This final move assured the success of Birdseye's company.

By the 1950s, frozen food sales exceeded one billion dollars every year. About 64 percent of all retail food markets had frozen food areas. Pre-cooked foods or prepared frozen foods began to account for a majority of the sales. There were even "boil-in" bags of frozen food items, derived from Birdseye's original experiments. The Association of Food and Drug Officials in the United States adopted a standard for the handling of frozen foods, to insure that foods were not allowed to thaw between manufacture and consumption. By then, most airlines were using frozen foods that could be prepared as needed on airliners.

Birdseye's Company Today

Today, Birds Eye, Inc. targets the growing wave of health-conscious consumers. They were the first to introduce "Custom Cuisine," a line of six varieties of vegetables and sauces to which meat is then added. They also introduced foil wrapping on boxed vegetables, which holds moisture ten times better than waxed paper. The Food and Drug Administration has acknowledged that frozen foods, when correctly handled and cooked, are as healthy as the same foods would be if cooked fresh. Birdseye had come to the same conclusion decades before. There are now children's frozen foods, "family size" portions, appetizers, meal kits, and snacks. The fast-paced lifestyles of modern consumers have encouraged the continued growth of the frozen food industry.

The process invented by Birdseye is still in widespread use. It preserves not only the flavor and texture of the foods, but also their nutritional value. Clarence Birdseye indirectly improved the health of almost everyone in the industrialized world by providing fresh food in a convenient way. Before his death in Springfield, Massachusetts, on October 8, 1956, at the age of 70, Birdseye realized that his discovery on the cold tundra of the Arctic had grown into a highly successful business.

Further Reading

A Sudden Chill, Time Life Books, 1991.

Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia.

Encarta Encyclopedia.

Clarence "Bob" Birdseye (1886–1956), American businessman and inventor, was originally an Amherst biology major, but dropped out and became a U.S. field naturalist in Labrador in 1920. There he became impressed with the well-preserved cellular structure of cooked fish that was frozen naturally in the Arctic outdoors. He noted that this quick freezing process caused less crystallization within the fish tissue. Once he returned to the United States, Birdseye developed his crude Multiplate Quick Freeze Machine: tightly sealed cartons, encased in metal, that were filled with food and then lowered into a low-temperature brine solution that froze the foods. Later, he froze foods with calcium chloride brine chilled to 40°F. In 1924 he organized the General Seafood Corporation and turned his attention to developing refrigerated railroad boxcars to transport frozen foods nationwide. In 1929 Birdseye sold his company to Postum, Inc., which became General Foods Corporation. His line of frozen foods was renamed Birds Eye.™ Ultimately, in 1949, using the anhydrous freezing process, Birdseye managed to cut freezing time from 18 hours to 90 minutes.

Though his process was not the first to freeze foods, distinction came to him for the quickness of his method for producing tasty, well-preserved fresh fish, fruits, and vegetables in retail-sized containers. The restaurant business profited greatly from his work. Birdseye held three hundred patents, in addition to a patent for a process of converting crushed sugarcane residue into paper pulp.

Frozen Peas

Birdseye's process indirectly improved the diet of the industrialized world by making possible the freshest frozen foods, frozen at or near farm sites, year round. This later led to the packaging of ethnic foods and meal combinations such as TV dinners. One of his most popular frozen products is green peas, the second largest vegetable crop in the United States. In the early twenty-first century more than 90 percent of all peas are sold as frozen peas. Frozen peas retain their brightest color and original shapes when placed in boiling water and removed from the heat.

Bibliography

"Alpert's Heated. Birdseye's Frozen." Safe Food Organization. 27 May 2002. Available at http://www.safefood.org/history.html

Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Elan, Elissa. "Clarence Birdseye." Nation's Restaurant News 30 (February 1996): 32.

Fucini, Joseph, and Suzy Fucini. Entrepreneurs: The Men and Women behind Famous Brand Names and How They Made It. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985.

Wallechinsky, David. The People's Almanac Presents the Twentieth Century: History with the Boring Parts Left Out. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1999.

—Marty Martindale

Clarence Frank Birdseye II
Born	December 9, 1886(1886-12-09) Brooklyn
Died	October 7, 1956 (aged 69) Gramercy Park Hotel Manhattan
Known for	Frozen food
Parents	Clarence Frank Birdseye I Ada Jane Underwood

Clarence Frank Birdseye II (December 9, 1886 – October 7, 1956) was an American inventor who is considered the founder of the modern frozen food industry.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Industrial development 3 Death 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

Early life

Birdseye's double belt freezer (US Patent #1,773,079)

Birdseye was born in Brooklyn in New York City. While a student at Amherst College, Birdseye worked as a field naturalist for the Unites States government in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana in order to help pay for his tuition. In the summers of 1910 and 1911, he captured several hundred small mammals and isolated several thousand ticks for research into the cause of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. His next field assignment, off and on from 1912 to 1915, was in Labrador, Canada, where he became further interested in food preservation by freezing, especially fast freezeing. He was taught by the Inuit how to ice fish under very thick ice. In -40°C weather, he discovered that the fish he caught froze almost instantly, and when thawed, tasted fresh. He recognized immediately that the frozen seafood sold in New York was of lower quality than the frozen fish of Labrador, and saw that applying this knowledge would be lucrative.

Conventional freezing methods of the time were commonly done at higher temperatures, and thus the freezing occurred much more slowly, giving ice crystals more time to grow. It is now known that fast freezing produces smaller ice crystals, which cause less damage to the tissue structure. When 'slow' frozen foods thaw, cellular fluids leak from the ice crystal-damaged tissue, giving the resulting food a mushy or dry consistency upon preparation.

In 1922 Birdseye conducted fish-freezing experiments at the Clothel Refrigerating Company, then established his own company, Birdseye Seafoods Inc., to freeze fish fillets via chilled air at -45°F (-43°C). In 1924 his company went bankrupt due to lack of consumer interest in the product. That same year he developed an entirely new process for commercially viable quick-freezing: pack fish in cartons, then freeze the contents between two refrigerated surfaces under pressure. Birdseye created a new company, General Seafood Corporation, to promote this method.

Industrial development

In 1925 his General Seafood Corporation moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts. There it employed Birdseye's newest invention, the double belt freezer, in which cold brine chilled a pair of stainless steel belts carrying packaged fish, freezing the fish quickly. His invention subsequently issued as US Patent #1,773,079, marking the beginning of today's frozen foods industry. Birdseye then took out patents on machinery which cooled more quickly so that only small ice crystals can form and cell walls are not damaged. In 1927 he began to extend the process to quick-freezing of meat, poultry, fruit, and vegetables.

In 1929, Birdseye sold his company and patents for $22 million to Goldman Sachs and the Postum Company, which eventually became General Foods Corporation, and which founded the Birds Eye Frozen Food Company. Birdseye continued to work with the company, developing frozen food technology. In 1930 the company began sales experiments in 18 retail stores around Springfield, Massachusetts to test consumer acceptance of quick-frozen foods. The initial product line featured 26 items, including 18 cuts of frozen meat, spinach and peas, a variety of fruits and berries, blue point oysters, and fish fillets. Consumer acceptance was strong, and today this experiment is considered the birth of retail frozen foods. The "Birds Eye" name remains a leading frozen-food brand.

Death

He died on October 7, 1956 of a heart attack at the Gramercy Park Hotel. He was 69 years old.^[1]

References

1. ^ "Clarence Birdseye Is Dead at 69. Inventor of Frozen-Food Process. Developed Method for Quick Freezing and Also Devised System for Dehydrating.". New York Times. October 9, 1956. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60F10FC3D5E147B93CBA9178BD95F428585F9. Retrieved 2008-07-16. "Clarence Birdseye, the inventor of a process for quickfreezing foods that made his name a household word in the United States, died Sunday night of a heart ailment in his residence at the Gramercy Park Hotel. He was 69 years old." 

Further reading

• "Clarence Birdseye." Food Engineering. September 2003. p. 66.
• About.com biography
• History of Rocky Mountain Labs, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease [1]

External links

Food portal

• Clarence Birdseye biography at Birds Eye Foods web site
• List of IFT Award winners

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)