Who is clarence birdseye

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 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 s, 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. Today, Birds Eye, Inc. 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, , at the age of 70, Birdseye realized that his discovery on the cold tundra of the Arctic had grown into a highly successful business.

All rights reserved. Birdseye Seafoods was Born Birdseye knew that he had discovered something very important, but he wasn't certain what.

The Final Secret At last Birdseye discovered the secret to safely freezing food. Retail Frozen Foods A venturesome biologist brought convenience and variety to American tables when he invented and marketed retail frozen foods. Labrador Life An adventurous biologist and a businessman, Clarence Birdseye devised a way to quick-freeze foods and market them to the public.

Birdseye was born in in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up hunting and practicing taxidermy. After studying biology at Amherst College, he took an assortment of wildlife jobs. In , he went to the northeastern Canadian province of Labrador to buy and sell fox furs. During one of the region's cold winters, he came up with the idea of flash-freezing foods.

This made national distribution a reality and Birdseye a legend. Unfortunately, Birdseye died October 7, However, his contributions still were relevant. As of , Birdseye's contributions became an asset of Pinnacle Foods, Inc. Today, we especially appreciate that Birdseye's process, still basically in use, preserves food's nutrients as well as its flavor.

In fact, we can say that Clarence Birdseye has indirectly improved both the health and convenience of virtually everyone in the industrialized world.

For more information, visit the Birdseye website. For an overview of the history of frozen foods, visit the American Frozen Foods Institute website.

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