Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man

by Mark Kurlansky

  Rather than an arrogant expression of his new position, the Birdseye house reveals a certain system of beliefs with which Bob had been raised. This brick house with white pillars perched on a hill did not look like other Eastern Point homes, or really other Gloucester mansions. In spirit it resembled the large, solid, wooden eighteenth-century houses built by shipowners and cod merchants, placed on the high ground over downtown Gloucester to look down at the harbor from where their wealth came. Like the old shipowners, Birdseye had built a house that stood as a symbol of economic success, of the solidity of American capitalism, of the reassuring power and stability of money. Birdseye thought like this, and at the outset of the Depression the many people who were starting to lose their faith in this outlook could look up at the Birdseye temple and see that at least capitalism had worked for someone. Then too it had a certain old-fashioned grand bourgeois feel like the brownstone where he was raised in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. The original plant manager, Joe Guinane, said of Birdseye, “He was an impatient man and had little interest in the routine affairs involved in running the business. Once the problem was solved, he was eager to turn to something new.” Now that he had sold his frozen-food idea, he might have been eager to move on. Some even suggested that he might retire. After all, he was in his mid-forties and had made his fortune. But Birdseye was a restless man who probably never would have retired no matter what age he reached. He said, “Following one’s curiosity is much more fun than taking things easy.”

  He was not yet through with frozen food. The problem had not yet been solved. It was still a long way from a real industry and an accepted part of American shopping and eating. All he had accomplished was getting the right people and money behind the project.

  Birdseye essentially continued his work in Gloucester, only now as a salaried executive for the Gloucester-based Birds Eye Frosted Foods division of General Foods. Breaking up the name “Birdseye” is often said to have been based on giving the product greater market appeal, but there is also the legal issue that proper names are not supposed to be used as trademarks. One of the early marketing decisions, along with breaking his name into two words, was calling the product “Frosted Foods” to emphasize that it was something completely different from the frozen food that people knew.

  Birdseye and General Foods were venturing into new territory. Birdseye later wrote, “Quick freezing was conceived, born, and nourished on a strange combination of ingenuity, stick-to-itiveness, sweat, and good luck.”

  By the fall of 1929 the new Birds Eye company was operating at capacity, stockpiling frozen food for its launch. On March 6, 1930, the local newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts, ran an advertisement with the headline “The Most Revolutionary Idea in the History of Food Will Be Revealed in Springfield Today.”

  The vaunted marketing and advertising experts of the former Post company had chosen Springfield as their site for selling twenty-seven different frozen items, including porterhouse steak, spring lamb chops, sliced ham, pork sausage, June peas, spinach, Oregon cherries, loganberries, red raspberries, fillets of haddock or sole, and bluepoint oysters. Twelve “demonstrators” were sent to ten participating stores. The demonstrators, all of whom were women, as were most of the shoppers, and the store staffs had all been put through a three-day training program largely focused on how to explain the difference between slow and fast freezing.

  The stores were given display freezers worth $1,500, which was far more expensive than most of these small family stores could have been able to buy. The contents, the various frozen foods, were sold on consignment. The freezers were far from flawless, and a team of mechanics, assigned to the ten stores, was constantly checking temperatures and making repairs and adjustments.

  The ad, which featured the new label, an upside-down bird and the name Birds Eye Frosted Foods, claimed it was “little short of magic.” The haddock, it boasted, was “as fresh flavored as the day the fish was drawn from the cold blue waters of the North Atlantic.” And “Here is the most wondrous magic of all! June peas, as gloriously green as any you will see next summer. Red raspberries, plump and tender and deliciously flavored. Big, smiling pie cherries—and loganberries. Imagine having them all summer-fresh in March!”

  This kind of hyperbole continued for many years, not only from the Birds Eye company, but also in major newspapers and magazines. In February 1932 the New York Times called frozen food a “scientific miracle in home management.” It reported on such items as peaches, strawberries, and oysters becoming available out of season, as though a frozen berry and a fresh one were indistinguishable. Popular Science Monthly claimed that frozen food and fresh food were “exactly the same.” Today’s discerning palate knows that frozen and fresh are considerably different, but for people who were accustomed to canned food or slow-frozen food, the new “frosted food” did seem miraculous. Consumers who had the courage to try the new frosted food were pleased with how much better it was than they had expected. When frozen fish was test-marketed in New England, three out of four purchasers of frozen fillets came back to buy more.

  While there was a positive initial response, frosted food was not an instant success. One of its drawbacks was that a major advantage of frozen food, that you could buy it now and use it whenever you wanted, was not yet a reality since few people had adequate home freezers.

  The owners of the first ten stores were people who believed frozen food was the future and were willing to proselytize to a wary public. Seyler said, “I clearly recall that it took five minutes of fast talking to sell a reluctant housewife one thirty-five cent package of Birds Eye frozen peas.” According to Seyler, “The consumer just couldn’t understand how anything frozen could possibly be safe, let alone good to eat.”

  One of the store owners, Joshua Davidson, who had taken over his father’s business, in an interview in Quick Frozen Foods magazine thirty years later, recalled, “I could see this as a sound venture, a progressive step in the food industry and I wanted to be in step. That’s why I agreed to be one of the first ten dealers.” In truth General Foods, in supplying the freezer and letting the store have the food on consignment, had made it risk free for the store owner. “Frankly,” said Davidson, “I couldn’t afford not to be the way Birds Eye offered to start me.”

  But to make it work, Birds Eye had to find stores that were deeply committed. Davidson said, “The food customer of 1930 was prejudiced against frozen foods. She felt foods were frozen because they were low-grade or spoiled and had to be frozen to be salvaged. So we had to convince the people frozen foods were okay. It was a mission and we had to do a lot of talking.”

  Davidson said that he was constantly answering questions about how the food was made, how to cook it. One woman asked if the company would start packaging meat and vegetables together. Davidson dismissed that idea, pointing out that people would prefer to choose their menus themselves. It took twenty years, but frozen TV dinners became a popular item of the 1950s, almost a symbol of a peculiar suburban affluence of the era.

  Mostly, people wanted to know if the frozen food had any taste. Many people asked questions but would not buy. But after a month of answering questions, Davidson saw the amount of frozen food sold in his store double.

  But frozen food was slow to catch on. One of the problems was that fresh food was relatively inexpensive. A top-quality steak often sold for less than thirty cents. It was inevitable that frozen food had to cost a few cents more than the fresh food it was made from. In the first decade of the Depression, canned food was for the poor, fresh for the middle class and affluent, and out-of-season frozen food was a high-quality luxury for the wealthy. Only in the 1940s, when Birds Eye started getting competitors, did prices come down and frozen food become popular with middle- and lower-income people.

  In 1930, Birdseye invented a portable multiplate freezer. A typical Birdseye invention, it was built from scraps of corrugated metal with steel plates and coils carrying refrigerant. It could be brought out to fields to fr
eeze produce as it was harvested.

  But though such devices increased production capacity, it was for a future that had not arrived. Retail interest in frosted food was not expanding along with capacity. By 1933 there were still only 516 retail stores in America carrying frosted food. When the company questioned retailers, the chief complaint was the store freezer units. Though they were given to the stores, they used a great deal of electricity and were expensive to operate. Birds Eye was not happy about the freezer either, because giving away $1,500 machines was a losing proposition.

  The Frozen Foods division was losing money, and General Foods put Edwin Gibson, a former mortgage banker, in charge of making the division profitable. Gibson, operating out of New York, saw the freezer units as the first problem. Birdseye, who had been in discussions with the American Radiator Company through Wetmore Hodges since before the Post buyout, agreed. Gibson gave a priority to the freezer American Radiator was developing. The Amrad cabinet turned out to be a huge step forward for frozen food. It put the frozen food on display with a slanted window in the front, but, more important, a freezer cost only $300, which meant the food could be sold at an affordable price without General Foods losing money on the cost of the freezers. And stores could afford to use them because the running cost for the new freezer was about $3.50 a month instead of the $16.00 and $20.00 per month of the old freezers. General Foods rented the Amrad units to stores for $10.00 to $12.50 per month. In 1934, Gibson ordered a new Springfield-style market test with the new freezers in Syracuse, New York. The freezer did so well there that another test was launched in Rochester. From there they spread throughout the Northeast into the Midwest and were well on their way to national distribution.

  Birdseye himself used his talents for persuasion, traveling to stores to hand sell his product. “He was one of the most articulate and persuasive men I have ever known,” Joe Guinane said. He had also become a minor celebrity. People in the Depression were hungry for success stories, and they liked the tale of the curious little genius—he looked the role—who through his remarkable resourcefulness had made a fortune on frozen food. He was booked for events that advertised, “See a demonstration of quick frosting by Mr. Clarence Birdseye, the inventor of the famous quick freezing process.” Sometimes the public was also invited to “meet Mrs. Clarence Birdseye.” Mostly women attended these demonstrations, but at one event in a Boston hotel, Bob’s old friend from Labrador Sir Wilfred Grenfell came to see the Birdseye demonstration.

  Even if the Frosted Foods division was struggling to make a profit, there seemed to have been no limit to the hyperbole directed toward frozen food and even Birdseye by journalists, politicians, and businessmen. In 1931 the mayor of Boston, James Michael Curley, hosted a dinner to honor Birdseye, according to press reports calling him a genius “whose contribution to the welfare of mankind gives promise of being the greatest in volume and value in a half century of American history.” After Birdseye gave a demonstration, freezing a steak with dry ice, the mayor stated that Birdseye’s invention “will probably be a greater contributing factor in preventing wars in the future than battleships or any other agency, because, after all, wars are caused by starvation.”

  On his $50,000 salary, Birdseye was still pondering the mysteries of freezing. He wanted to try freezing everything, including prepared foods, and he never tired of experimenting with new frozen species such as porpoise and whale. As though he were still living in Labrador struggling to procure fresh food, he ate whatever wildlife he found in Gloucester, including birds he trapped. He would freeze these catches to see if they froze well. He was particularly fond of coot, a variety of waterfowl.

  He also liked to investigate more abstract concepts of freezing. How long would frozen meat keep? Forever, said scientists, if it was not exposed to air, though some speculated that frozen animal fat would deteriorate after a few centuries. Birdseye reflected on Eleanor’s moose. It had become legendary in the Birdseye family that in 1929 Eleanor had shot a moose, though where she had hunted it has been lost in time. They butchered it and froze it, thawing out a part from time to time for dinner. By 1933 nothing was left but the neck. Even the omnivorous Birdseye did not like moose neck because it was tough and gamy. Would four years of freezing change it? He had to find out, so he thawed it and cooked it, and to his surprise found it to be tender.

  To further his research, Birdseye, who always sought to surround himself with highly qualified people, hired a chemist experienced in food issues, Donald Tressler, to head the research team. Birdseye arranged for Tressler and his family to move into his old home with the long shady porch on Beach Road. Birdseye and Tressler conducted experiments measuring meat tenderness with a tire pressure gauge and a laboratory instrument called a penetrometer. They demonstrated that meat became tenderer after a week of quick-freezing than before it was frozen.

  Birdseye still wanted to find out how the Inuit fish had survived freezing. They had frozen fish in the air, and the fish had still been alive months later when thawed. How can a living organism survive freezing? The question was more than a century old. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when scientists started experimenting with faster ways of freezing and arriving at ever-colder temperatures, the question periodically arose whether an organism, if frozen fast enough, could have its functions slowed but not stopped so that it could be restored on thawing. Bob, who swore he had seen this accomplished by the Inuit in Labrador, would catch pickerel in the nearby Niles Pond, and try to freeze them and keep them alive. Birdseye’s eldest son, Kellogg, always remembered his mother’s irritation at continually finding fish flipping around in the bathtub. Bob would explain to children in the neighborhood what he was trying to do, and it was generally assumed that it could not be done, that Mr. Birdseye was brilliant but a bit eccentric, though some thought that if Birdseye believed it was possible, it was.

  At the exact same time, 1934–36, scientists in the Soviet Union were wondering about the same thing. They concluded that freezing killed animals. However, they noted that an exception was fish. They demonstrated that when ice formed around the skin and the subcutaneous tissue directly under it, the fish would become hard and appear to be frozen, but the living organs inside would not freeze and could continue to function. In 1934, N. A. Borodin in his study “The Anabiosis or Phenomenon of Resuscitation of Fishes After Being Frozen” concluded that it could be done and that arctic species were particularly suited to survive freezing. The fish Birdseye had observed in Labrador were pulled into –40-degree air, and the water on them instantly froze, possibly leaving the interior of the fish unfrozen and unharmed.

  At the exact same time, 1935, a man whose name and profession have been lost walked into the office of E. W. Williams, who had recently become the publisher of a magazine on the meat trade, Butchers’ Advocate. The visitor offered to demonstrate something he called suspended animation. He showed Williams a goldfish in a bowl. He took the fish out and plunged it into dry ice, freezing it instantly. The fish was rock hard and lifeless when he dropped it back in the bowl. It sank to the bottom. After a minute the tail started to wriggle. Soon it was swimming circles around the bowl. Shortly after that Williams saw a demonstration of quick freezing by the Birds Eye company at a food fair. Years later he would cite the combination of Birds Eye’s out-of-season fruit and the revived goldfish with the intriguing label “suspended animation”—and as the two experiences that made him think frozen food was “an industry with a future.” In 1938 he started an industry magazine called Quick Frozen Foods, on which Birdseye served as an adviser for the rest of his life. The magazine now has a Web site and continues to report on the frozen-food industry. As for suspended animation, it has led to the science of cryonics, a controversial field in which humans are frozen shortly after being pronounced legally dead in the hopes that a still nonexistent procedure will restore them to life at some time in the future.

  When Birdseye had an idea, no matter how nutty it seemed, it w
as always worth considering. Some of his ideas seemed to be great successes, even though they were never used, such as a machine he built to freeze vegetables individually, rather than in a block. A pea would come down a chute and land on one of a series of revolving freezing plates.

  Though his laboratory was small and only employed twenty-two chemists and assistants, Birdseye was fondly remembered in Gloucester as someone who offered work through the Depression. In a 1980 article in the Gloucester Daily Times, Bill Nickerson, a former Birdseye worker, said, “There was nothing as far as jobs go then. Mr. Birdseye gave me a job right out of high school, when I couldn’t find another one.” He worked as a thirty-cent-an-hour laboratory assistant.

  In this laboratory the team worked out the problems of freezing vegetables, fruits, and prepared foods. They learned that vegetables degenerated due to an enzyme that could be removed by blanching—a quick plunge in boiling water. Then the vegetables were rapidly cooled, quick-frozen, and packed in watertight cellophane. This left them with a bright color. Frozen peas became one of the most successful Birds Eye frosted foods because they were such a brilliant green.

  The laboratory team also solved the problem of frozen sliced onions, which always turned black with freezing. They found that if blanched for just the right length of time, the onions would remain white. Fruits were difficult because they softened and oxidized brown with freezing. The oxidation was solved with a small amount of sulfur dioxide or ascorbic acid, which is vitamin C. But they were not able to completely solve the problem of texture. An expert from Cornell, Lucy Kimball, was brought in to develop techniques for cooking prepared foods so that after being thawed and reheated they maintained their quality.