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Member Profile: Birds Eye Foods - A Short History of the Frozen Foods Section |
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Written On: May/June 2004 |
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Written By: by Scott Carlson |
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His story is more fantastic than fiction. Although unrecognized by most people, his accomplishments touch the lives of millions of people everyday.
His name was Clarence Birdseye. He was born in Brooklyn in 1886. The name Birdseye was originally two words and comes from an early ancestor’s actions that saved the life of an English Queen by shooting an attacking hawk squarely through its eye. The name might be more familiar to consumers today as Birds Eye Foods. Clarence is considered by many as the father of frozen food.
“The public customarily thinks of me as an inventor,” he said about himself. “But inventing is only one of my lines. I am also a bank director, a president of companies, a fisherman, an author, an engineer, a cook, a naturalist, a stockholder, a consultant, and a dock-walloper.”
According to the Birds Eye Company, the practice of freezing food for preservation has been around since the 1620s. The first commercial frozen foods project did not take place for nearly 250 years. And in the early 1900s, Clarence began the frigid journey of developing, refining and making the process of freezing foods practical for everybody.
The journey began after Clarence’s family moved from Long Island, New York, to Montclair, New Jersey, while he was still in high school. The young, adventurous outdoorsman attended a class in food preparation and cooking. His interest in the culinary arts would continue some years later during his first job as a naturalist with the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s Biological Survey. He collected specimens of animals and birds in the Southwest. During this time, Clarence began experimenting with foods few others would touch, such as rattlesnake. He is also credited with making and eating a soup from mice, chipmunks, gophers, and packrats.
In 1911, Clarence left his job at the Department of Agriculture. His next adventure would be as part of an expedition in the waters off Labrador. He would be traveling by boat for six weeks with the famous medical missionary Sir Wilfred Greenfield.
While in Labrador, Clarence discovered the vast amounts of money being made by breeding and trapping foxes. He left the expedition and would spend the next five years traveling by dogsled collecting furs. During this time, Clarence married the former Eleanor Gannett and in 1916 had a son. They lived in a three-room cabin 250 miles from the nearest doctor.
Clarence’s appetite for unusual meats returned while he lived in the northern tundra. He dined on starlings, blackbirds, whale, porpoise, lynx and lizards.
"I ate about everything … beaver tail, polar bear and lion tenderloin,” he said. “And I'll tell you another thing, the front half of a skunk is excellent."
It was there in the frozen lands of Labrador that Clarence would experience an epiphany of sorts. During his many dietary ventures, Clarence realized that duck and caribou frozen during the winter tasted much better than those frozen in the spring and fall. He took note at how easily food was preserved in the arctic climate.
He witnessed and learned the Eskimos' rudimentary quick-freeze methods, a process by which items are frozen at such a speed that only small ice crystals are able to form. He remembered that fish, frozen quickly, had more flavor and the texture was better than fish frozen slowly.
Clarence practiced this fast-freezing method on cabbage for his family.
Some years later, the Birdseye family moved back to the United States and, in 1922, Clarence began working in the wholesale fish business. He was able to perform further experiments in the quick freezing food process he had learned while living among Eskimos.
"My contribution was to take Eskimo knowledge and the scientists' theories and adapt them to quantity production," he said.
Eventually, Clarence would invest in a $7 fan, a few buckets of water saturated with salt, and some slabs of ice. With these essentials, he was able to perfect a method of flash-freezing meats under high pressure.
"Production of perishable foods, dressed at the point of production and quick-frozen in consumer packages, was initiated, so far as I am aware, in the kitchen of my own home late in 1923 when I experimentally packaged rabbit meat and fish fillets in candy boxes and froze the packages with dry ice," he wrote in his journal.
The major contributions Clarence made to frozen foods were freezing it so fast there was no damage to the molecular structure of the food, and freezing it in a package that could be sold directly to consumers.
Clarence’s scientific endeavors didn’t end there. He would go on to invent freezers for smaller markets that couldn’t afford larger, top-of-the-line units; a one-man, shoulder-fired, "kickless" harpoon gun for use in hunting whales and a process of turning sugar cane waste into pulp for paper production. Over his lifetime, he was granted 300 U.S. and foreign patents.
A heart attack took Clarence’s life in 1956.
Today, Birds Eye Foods, in Tacoma, employs 250 people and produces a line of foods ranging from canned soup to boxed pasta, said Bea Slizewski, Birds Eye’s corporate communications vice president. Its predecessor company, Nalley Fine Foods, began operations in 1918 and, in 1944, became members of the Federated Industries of Washington, as the Association of Washington Business was known at the time. Birds Eye Foods acquired the business in 1975 and, in the late 1990s, consolidated all divisions into a one company structure, a change mandated by the increasingly competitive nature of the food business.
Even though the company has been operating here for more than 85 years, it still faces tough times as the economy dips into recession.
“These are challenging times for any business,” said Karen White, Bird Eye Foods’ human resources director. “Our product lines remain regional favorites, but profit margins in the food business remain low. And B&O taxes are higher here than in other states where we have operations.”
“In Washington, we have sold two businesses in the past five years; peanut butter and pickles.”
Washington’s traffic is also an issue Birds Eye Foods would like to have resolved.
“Traffic in the I-5 corridor has slowed transportation of goods,” White said. “These delays only add to the cost of products.”
Nevertheless, even during these tough times, the company remains resilient; a resilience fostered by a modest man’s drive to improve the quality of life for American families.
“Perhaps my basic contribution was the idea that a wide line of perishable foods — meats, poultry, seafood, fruits and vegetables — could be dressed ready to cook, conveniently packaged, really quick frozen, and then delivered to housewives while still truly fresh," Clarence said in an early radio program.
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