Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man

by Mark Kurlansky

  In 1926, Birdseye’s company bought a building on a peninsula in the downtown harbor front known as the Fort, which was one of the oldest neighborhoods in Gloucester. During the American Revolution and the War of 1812 there was an actual fort there guarding the harbor from the British. It was a hill of winding waterfront streets. On Commercial Street by the harbor docks most of the buildings were used for fish processing. This building was unusual for the Gloucester waterfront because it had an elevator, which was housed in a tower. The elevator could carry fish to flakes on the roof. But Birdseye used freezers, not fish flakes. The Birdseye tower has become iconic in the Gloucester Harbor view. The first floor was used to develop frozen-food experiments, and the second floor had offices for developing and planning their future.

  Bob’s ambitions for the future were not small. He named his company General Seafoods Corporation because he imagined frozen food, still a small oddity, becoming a huge industry in which his company held a place comparable to General Electric and General Motors in their fields. Once the industry was well established, his company, according to Birdseye’s plan, would be renamed General Foods. His first manager, Joe Guinane, recalled in 1960 that Birdseye was tirelessly experimenting: “There was not a frozen food item that I do not recall Birdseye experimenting with at one time or another in the early days. He tried all kinds of things—not only seafood, meats and vegetables, but baked and unbaked goods as well as cooked foods.” He envisioned the entire future of frozen food.

  General Seafoods began with haddock fillets frozen in rectangular cardboard boxes. It produced thousands of pounds of the boxed frozen fillets in the plant at the Fort. Bob’s omnivorous tendencies were once again in full swing. He prowled the docks for anything unusual that he could try freezing. He let the Gloucester dragger captains know he was interested. He froze whale, shark, porpoise, and according to one account he even found an alligator to freeze.

  Guinane was an engineer who had been working with J. J. Barry, an investor already thoroughly seduced by the irrepressible Birdseye. Barry talked the engineer into joining the venture. “I felt I was taking a rather daring step,” Guinane later recalled. But who could resist Bob Birdseye? Guinane said, “I think the primary qualities that made Bob Birdseye what he was, were the combination of a superb restless mind, an insatiable curiosity, enormous persistence, and the total lack of mental blocks.”

  Though it did pack a great deal of frozen fish and tried to sell it, the company was more involved with developing machinery. That was why Birdseye had chosen Guinane, an engineer, to manage his seafood company.

  In addition to freezing machinery and packaging, they worked on many other devices. Barry developed an electronic machine for trimming fish. Birdseye invented a new machine for the old technique of brining, lightly exposing the fish to salt water to accelerate the freezing process. Birdseye also invented a new fish-scaling device. Other electric fish scalers existed, but they would stall out when hitting a fin, while the Birdseye scaler didn’t. They built a system that picked up fillets, washed them, and brined them. Birdseye believed he could improve the quality of products if he could develop a controlled mechanized system.

  In July 1925, not long after he had set up his Gloucester company, he wrote to Rice that his filleting machine filleted twenty-three and a half haddock a minute and he was anticipating a new and better motor that might do as many as fifty fish a minute. Filleting machines were the new big thing of the 1920s seafood business, and by the 1930s fillets, fresh and frozen, would dominate the seafood market. Representatives of filleting operations at the Boston Fish Pier and from Nova Scotia came to Gloucester to look at Birdseye’s work. The men from Boston told him that in the next twelve months the Boston Fish Pier planned to produce and sell 10 million pounds of haddock fillets.

  Originally, General Seafoods’ freezing process resembled what Birdseye had been doing in New York. Fish fillets were packed tightly in five-by-three-by-two-inch cartons, his first patented process, and then a number of cartons were placed in a long metal holder that was immersed in freezing calcium chloride.

  Of the more than two hundred Birdseye inventions, perhaps the most important was the one he applied to patent on June 18, 1927. It was patent 1,773,079, and it truly began the frozen-food industry. Birdseye begins the application by asserting:

  My invention relates to methods of treating food products by refrigerating the same, preferably by “quick” freezing the product into a frozen block, in which the pristine qualities and flavors of the product are retained for a substantial period after the block has been thawed.

  His invention describes every step of the process, including how to pack fish fillets in a box. Among the advantages he claimed for his method was that it was “indirect”—the product has no contact with the refrigerant—and that the frozen food came out in a package suitable for marketing to the consumer. He claimed to have invented for the first time ever a way of producing frozen food “as a practical, commercial article of commerce.”

  He accomplished this by packing food very tightly to eliminate air, in cartons holding a two-inch-thick block, and pressing these cartons between two plates that were kept between –20 and –50 degrees Fahrenheit. The carton was held between the freezing plates for seventy-five minutes. The blocks not only froze the food solid but compacted it into a tight regular rectangle, assuring complete freezing in a short period of time and no spaces for bacteria to enter.

  Without having made a single scientific breakthrough, Birdseye had developed a process for freezing food on which an entire new industry was founded. It was called multiplate freezing. It remained the basic commercial freezing system for decades. In 1946, The New Yorker claimed that the only change in freezing since Birdseye’s invention was that the plates were now hollow. But in reality, hollowing the plates and putting an ammonia-based refrigerant inside were only two of numerous Birdseye improvements that came after the initial invention.

  He had solved most of the problems that he had pondered. Multiplate freezing could produce a large amount of frozen food, cold enough and frozen quickly enough; the freezing was indirect, the air-space problem was eliminated, and the final boxed product was in a convenient form suitable for marketing. But clearing away these problems only clarified how many other obstacles stood in the way of General Seafoods becoming the General Motors of food. It was not an unprecedented problem in the world of inventing—inventors who were too far ahead of their time, producing cars without paved roads, telephones without telephone wiring. The classic example was Thomas Edison, who developed a lightbulb that would have been commercially viable if only there was an electric grid to hook it up to.

  Still ahead of Birdseye was the Adam Trask problem. Trask was a fictitious character in John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel, East of Eden. In the novel Trask learns in the early twentieth century of a mastodon that has been preserved for millennia frozen in ice and concludes that frozen food is the future. He studies everything he can find on freezing and bacteria and manages to freeze a trainload of lettuce and ship it east from California’s Salinas valley. But a snowslide delays the train over the Sierras, the cars cannot protect the lettuce against unseasonably warm weather in the Midwest, and there is a further delay in Chicago. There is no infrastructure for shipping frozen food, and the entire shipment is ruined, Trask loses a fortune, and everyone in Salinas laughs at him while he stubbornly insists that frozen food is the future.

  This was now Birdseye’s dilemma as well. Because Birdseye had been more focused on developing equipment and industrial processes, he had not found solutions to the problems that would be encountered in distributing frozen food. But that first summer of 1927 he froze 1,666,033 pounds of seafood and was faced with the problem of what to do with it. His company wanted to ship it to the Midwest, where consumers had no fresh seafood. But there were no trucks or train cars for frozen food, and the few warehouses for frozen food to ship to were not cold enough. There was no distribution network capable
of dealing with the problems of frozen food, and retail stores had no equipment cold enough for holding or displaying top-quality quick-frozen food.

  Then too there was the daunting problem of getting the consumer to accept the product. Just as had happened to Adam Trask, people laughed at the idea of frozen food. Birdseye’s food was completely different from what people knew as frozen food at the time, which might have been an advantage considering the low reputation of that food, but most people found the new ideas strange and implausible. To most people, if meat was frozen, it was a whole side of the animal or whole chickens. Frozen vegetables were an unheard-of idea, and the only frozen fruits most people had ever heard of were large barrels of frozen strawberries, most of which were purchased industrially for making strawberry ice cream or jam and jelly. Fish in fillets was also still a new idea. Birdseye’s company placed white notices inside the top and bottom of each box of fish that stated in red lettering, “The product in this container is frozen hard as marble by a marvelous new process which seals in every bit of just-from-the-ocean flavor.”

  Birdseye had also drifted into the middle of a central debate of his time. Today there is the issue of whether electronics are destroying industrial jobs. But in the 1920s the issue was whether industry was destroying the livelihoods of artisans and craftsmen. Labor unions that represented butchers, seafood processors, and poultry workers came out early and emphatically against frozen food. They believed that if this new idea caught on, food would all be processed in frozen-food factories, and their workers would be put out of business. Birdseye always denied this, but of course they were right, although frozen food has not hurt them nearly as much as supermarket chains. The canning industry also feared frozen food, and once Birdseye established the idea that frozen food would come in rectangular cartons rather than a container that can makers might produce, they also turned against him.

  New ideas generate a great deal of distrust. Railroads were unenthusiastic about getting into the transport of frozen food because they imagined huge liability for shipments that accidentally thawed. Public health officials, and even some scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where Birdseye liked to think he had friends, opposed frozen foods. If it was true that fast freezing preserved everything in its natural state, which it would return to upon thawing, then, they all reasoned, pests and diseases would be preserved in the freezing process and shipped around the country in frozen food.

  Birdseye bitterly complained that every time he launched a new product, he was forced to spend a great deal of badly needed research and development money at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology proving it was safe to eat. He proved that freezing killed trichinae, which causes trichinosis, before he was allowed to sell frozen pork and that it killed corn borers before he could get approval for frozen corn. Vegetables were held in particular suspicion by health authorities because, unlike the heating process in canning, freezing methods offered no sterilization.

  Almost everything in the packaging process had to be invented. There was not even a strong, transparent, waterproof wrapping material available. This was more than ten years before plastic was invented. The company started with wax paper, but it gave little protection from moisture and completely deteriorated during thawing. Then it used a vegetable parchment, which did stand up to the thawing process but then stuck to the box and also was not at all waterproof. The company coated the parchment with paraffin, and it no longer stuck with thawing, but it dried out in the freezer. It bought cellophane from France. This was a fairly new product that had generated some excitement. The Swiss inventor Jacques E. Brandenberger made it from chemically treated cellulose and had his major breakthrough in 1912, when he discovered that adding glycerin made it pliable. But Birdseye discovered that it disintegrated when it came into contact with wet fish. He persuaded the DuPont Company to make cellophane with a waterproof coating. The chemical company saw a commercial potential to this product and went into production, even though at the start General Seafoods of Gloucester was its only customer. Then cigarette companies bought it, and cigars started to come wrapped in it, and soon cellophane wrappers were a standard feature of American consumer goods—another little-known Birdseye influence on our world.

  Even new kinds of ink and glue had to be developed because frozen-food cartons became wet as soon as they began thawing, and so everything had to be waterproof.

  For all this innovation General Seafoods still had no adequate transport or warehouses, and even if it did manage to get its frozen food to retail stores, these stores had no way of keeping the food frozen. Sometimes General Seafoods even sold food directly to a large family. Stores that bought the frozen food often thawed it out and sold it as fresh food.

  In 1928, the first retail store freezer became available. According to Birdseye, it cost as much as the entire rest of the average grocery store.

  Birdseye developed an improved method of freezing—the continuous belt freezer. Instead of cooling plates, this machine had metal belts chilled with calcium chloride spray at –45 degrees Fahrenheit. The belts could be adjusted to press the packages tightly between them. The two-inch-thick belts froze the package from the bottom and the top so that it froze in very little time.

  This was intended not only for greater production but for a future in which all kinds of foods were frozen in different-sized boxes. A space between the belts was adjustable so that the packages would always be tight-fitting. It was at first difficult to find the right belts. Birdseye started with Swedish belts made of watch spring steel, which did not hold up well to brine. He then tried copper, then bronze, then Monel metal, a corrosion-resistant silver alloy. Finally, the solution was stainless steel, a steel alloy with chromium to resist corrosion. Stainless steel had at this time been in development for more than a decade, but it was not widely available until the 1930s. When Birdseye first explained the machine to Isaac Rice, Rice called it a Rube Goldberg contraption. But it was a contraption with a future, an improvement on multiplate freezing—a machine good enough to be the basis of a new industry.

  One of the drawbacks was that the Birdseye machine was fifty yards long and weighed twenty tons, and it could only be operated in a cold, insulated room. The company bought a neighboring building in 1928 to house the huge machine.

  None of these new ideas out at the Fort in Gloucester were happening in a vacuum. When the Birdseye group struggled to invent a new food industry, it was not as wild a dream as it might seem today, because it was at the dawn of an era when industry was reinventing food and putting new tastes on the market packaged in new ways, seemingly every day. In 1928, Kraft put Velveeta cheese on the market. James Lewis Kraft, born near Fort Erie, Ontario, in 1874, was a Chicago cheese merchant with a set of problems that would become familiar to Birdseye. Cheese was sold under unrefrigerated glass domes, with slices cut off the wheel or block. Heat deteriorated the cheese, and air dried it, forcing retailers to cut the dried end off every time they served a new customer, wasting a large part of the block. If retail stores had had better refrigeration and a good airtight wrapper like plastic wrap had been available, processed cheese might never have been invented. Processed cheese was originally a Swiss invention by Walter Gerber in 1911. Additional salts, such as sodium phosphate, potassium phosphate, tartrate, and citrate, make the cheese more resistant to spoilage by keeping the fats and solids from separating. Kraft began experimenting with a cheese-based factory blend. He made a fortune selling canned processed cheese to the army during World War I and continued developing the product and the company after the war. In part he combated spoilage by packaging small amounts of cheese. Velveeta, wrapped in tinfoil and packed in individual wooden boxes, was his crowning glory. It melted so smoothly it seemed like velvet. Kraft originally was not trying to make cheese melt well, but the meltiness of his processed cheese—because it would not separate with heat the way real cheese does—changed the way Americans ate. It made melted cheese ubiquitous in the American diet, in
cluding macaroni and cheese, cheeseburgers, grilled-cheese sandwiches, and au gratin everything.

  The same year as Velveeta came out, Walter E. Diemer of the Fleer Chewing Gum Company invented bubble gum, to many kids the greatest thing since sliced bread, which itself was invented that same year when Otto Frederick Rohwedder’s commercial slicing machine was first used in Chillicothe, Missouri. The slicer debuted on July 7, 1928, according to a story that day in the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, which covered the launching. In 1929, the year Harland Sanders opened his first fried chicken restaurant in a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky, the soft drink 7UP was first marketed as Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda.

  Nor was Birdseye the only one experimenting with packaging. In addition to Kraft’s wrapped cheese, in 1929 milk was first sold in cartons instead of bottles, and the British scientist E. A. Murphy whipped latex rubber in a kitchen mixer and created foam rubber.

  By 1928 most of General Seafoods’ impressive production of frozen food had not been sold. The company was learning to freeze meats, fruits, and vegetables but could not develop the market for them. It even lacked funding to develop new products. Bob was interested in selling fish sausage. He thought this was a good product because it could use fish species that were not highly valued, and the sausage could therefore be produced cheaply. But he suspended the project because he lacked the $3,000 necessary to develop sausage-making equipment. Bob had an idea for an improved freezer but did not have the money to develop it.

  The company needed more capital to continue research and to develop new ideas. Otherwise it could never grow into a major industry. Banks would not finance a new frozen-food industry. They would finance the old bulk-freezing operations, but this new packaged frozen-food business seemed too risky and too improbable. Reminiscing in an industry magazine, Refrigerating Engineering, in 1953, Birdseye wrote, “A bank would no more loan on our inventory than on ice stacked in Death Valley!”