Clarence Birdseye Facts
Clarence Birdseye Facts
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| Interesting Clarence Birdseye Facts: |
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| Birdseye attended Montclair High School in New Jersey, and was briefly a student at Amherst College, but dropped out because of financial problems. |
| Birdseye started out as a taxidermist. |
| He worked in New Mexico and Arizona as an "assistant naturalist", which was a job that involved killing off coyotes. He also worked with entomologist Willard Van Orsdel King in Montana, where Birdseye captured hundreds of small mammals, and King removed several ticks for research and isolated them as the cause of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. |
| Birdseye's next field assignment was off and on and he then became very interested in food preservation by freezing, especially fast freezing. He discovered that food that was caught frozen almost instantly, and, when thawed, tasted fresh. |
| The way food was frozen at the time was very ineffective because it was done at higher temperatures, so he tried to find a way to improve frozen food and keep it fresh longer. |
| In 1922 Birdseye conducted experiments freezing fish at the Clothel Refrigerating Company, and then created his own company, Birdseye Seafoods Inc. |
| In 1924 his company went bankrupt because there was a lack of consumer interest in the product. |
| That same year he developed a new process for commercially viable quick-freezing: packing fish in cartons, and then freezing the contents between two refrigerated surfaces under pressure. |
| Birdseye created a brand new company, General Seafood Corporation, to promote this method. |
| His General Seafood Corporation moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1925. There it used Birdseye's newest invention, the double belt freezer, where cold brine chilled a pair of stainless steel belts carrying packaged fish, which froze the fish quickly. |
| His invention was issued as US Patent #1,773,079, showing the beginning of today's frozen food industry. |
| Birdseye took out patents on other machinery that cooled even more quickly, so that only small ice crystals could form and cell membranes were not damaged. |
| In 1927, Birdseye began to extend the process beyond fish into quick-freezing of meat, poultry, fruit, and vegetables. |
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