Clarence Birdseye and the Rise of Frozen Foods

Summary

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Stuff You Missed in History Class

Episode: Clarence Birdseye and the Rise of Frozen Foods

Hosts: Holly Frey & Tracy B. Wilson
Release Date: November 5, 2025

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Overview

This episode delves into the life and legacy of Clarence Birdseye, the American inventor and entrepreneur whose innovations revolutionized the frozen food industry. Holly and Tracy explore Birdseye's upbringing, career, quirky personality, and the circumstances that led him to develop a flash freezing method that would change how the world ate—sometimes against significant odds and skepticism.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Birdseye’s Background and Personality

• Family & Early Life
  • Born December 9, 1886, in Brooklyn, NY, as the sixth of nine children.
  • His father, Clarence Frank Birdseye, was a successful lawyer, while his mother was Ada Jane Underwood.
  • The family experienced a significant financial crisis during Birdseye’s youth, affecting his academic career.
  • From childhood, he was fascinated by nature, but more as a hunter and trapper than today’s modern naturalist image.
  • Quote: “He was part of that era where being a naturalist often included killing animals.” (Tracy, 03:36)
• Eccentric and Audacious
  • Birdseye promoted an image of himself as audacious and pioneering, though he was quite intellectually gifted.
  • Quote: “I was dwelling on the idea that an American image includes audacity and pioneer spirit, but not intellect.” (Holly, 04:09)
• Interests Outside the Norm
  • Taught taxidermy as a child, took a rare-for-boys cooking class in high school (05:29), and began going by "Bob".

2. Education & Early Career Experiments

• Dropped out of Amherst College due to lack of funds (06:45), despite being from a well-off family; family’s financial woes possibly more serious than known.
• Early career: U.S. Department of Agriculture, fieldwork in Arizona, New Mexico, and Montana, trapping animals and collecting ticks for Rocky Mountain spotted fever research (08:50).
• Developed a knack for entrepreneurship with fur trading side hustles (07:30).

3. Labrador Experience: Seeds of Innovation

• Assignment to Labrador via Wilfred Grenfell; scarcity and harshness of the climate deeply influenced Birdseye’s interest in food preservation and culinary experiments (12:04).

• Noticed that fish, frozen instantly in the extreme cold, tasted fresh when thawed—unlike most frozen food in the U.S.

  • Quote: “He noticed that because of the freezing temperatures, fish were freezing almost as soon as they were pulled out of the water... how fresh they tasted when they were thawed and cooked later.” (Holly, 17:25)

• Began conducting informal experiments on the role of freezing speed in food texture.

• Experimented on vegetables and meats, noticing smaller ice crystals improved food quality (18:24).

4. Return to the U.S. and Development of Flash Freezing

• Back in the U.S., Birdseye was driven by a commitment to improve the quality and logistics of shipping fish (21:24).
• Initial business venture (Birds Eye Seafood, 1923) focused exclusively on fish but struggled financially.
• Developed and patented (1924) a machine for flash freezing pre-packed food, notably more effective than existing solutions due to extremely low temperatures (as low as -45°F) (23:17).
• Quote: “The basic process flash froze foods... quickly enough that they didn't develop water crystals in them, which helped them retain their original fresh flavor.” (Holly, 23:17)
• Although innovative, early ventures nearly failed for lack of funds—Birdseye even cashed out his life insurance and moved the family for business survival (24:39).

5. Breakthrough: Corporate Backing and Industry Transformation

• Gained new investors including JP Morgan, leading to the formation of General Seafoods Corporation (25:25).
• Developed pre-scaled and filleted fish for convenience—an entirely new consumer concept (26:25).
• Secured multiple patents and developed continuous improvement processes (27:25).

6. Commercial Success and Cultural Impact

• General Seafoods Corporation gained industry traction, but public skepticism about frozen food remained high.
• Birdseye sent samples to industry leaders to demonstrate quality (28:12).
• The major breakthrough: sale of his company (including patents and machinery) to Postum Inc. in 1929 for $23.5 million (29:00).
  • Quote: “Postum really thought that Clarence Birdseye had developed the future of food.” (Tracy, 30:00)
• Postum changed its name to General Foods Corporation, bringing substantial PR experience and marketing muscle to drive public acceptance.

7. Wider Influence and Technical Innovations

• Birdseye continued as president and high-level consultant in the new corporation, working on both food and non-food innovations:
  • Vitamin C used to keep fruit from browning (35:10)
  • Enhanced packaging and freezer cases for supermarkets (37:10)
  • Electric lamp reflectors (patented 1935), faster individual freezing “gravity froster” machines (1939).
• Helped standardize and expand the market for frozen foods (regulatory advocacy, improved logistics with refrigerated train cars—40:08).

8. Later Life, Patents, and Final Years

• Shifted focus to other food technologies (dehydrated or “anhydrous” foods), and even to hydroponics for urban farming (40:40).
• Late in life, attempted to innovate paper production from sugar cane waste, moving to Peru to develop this process before returning to the U.S. (42:09).
• Granted nearly 300 patents over his lifetime—a prolific inventor.
• Died in 1956; left a college fund at Amherst to help prevent others’ educations being cut short as his had been (42:57).

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Memorable Quotes & Highlights

• On entrepreneurial spirit:
  “He sort of always seemed to be mixing his love of nature with his love of a good hustle.” (Tracy, 06:11)
• On food innovation:
  “A lot of other companies froze their foods just below freezing. But recalling the harsh winters in Labrador, Birdseye froze his foods colder than 45 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.” (Holly, 23:17)
• On the influence of marketing and perception:
  “Over time, the numbers crept up. But General Foods spent a lot of money to get those numbers, including supplying the costly refrigerated cases that the food could be stocked in.” (Tracy, 37:10)
• On risk and reward:
  “He made some scary moves, but he was ultimately right... it takes a lot of bravado to gamble that way.” (Tracy, 43:47)

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Important Timestamps

• Early life and personality: 02:26–05:48
• College, early career, and Labrador: 05:48–12:36
• Frozen food insight and early experiments: 17:25–21:24
• Flash freezing invention and patent: 22:46–24:39
• Sale to Postum / General Foods Corporation: 29:00–30:42
• Impact on frozen food industry and later inventions: 34:28–41:38
• Legacy, final years, and Birdseye’s impact today: 42:09–43:47

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Tone and Style

Holly and Tracy maintain a conversational, slightly whimsical yet deeply informative tone, balancing Birdseye’s eccentricities and intellect with a clear-eyed look at the historical context. They are candid about the more problematic aspects of his biography, shifting easily between curiosity, admiration, and gentle humor.

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Takeaways

Clarence Birdseye was not just a prolific inventor but an audacious, sometimes controversial figure whose single-mindedness and curiosity changed the world’s eating habits. His life was marked by significant financial risk, persistent innovation, and the transformation of frozen foods from a maligned product to a global industry worth billions. Birdseye’s story underlines the power of practical curiosity, resilience, and, as Holly and Tracy repeatedly note, a willingness to try (and eat) nearly anything.

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Further Listening

For listeners interested in food history, industrial innovation, or stories of idiosyncratic visionaries, this episode presents a vivid narrative filled with oddities, business near-misses, and sweeping social change sparked by one determined individual.

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Transcript

[Holly Fry]

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Is provided by Lilly, a medicine company. This episode is brought to you by PBS, home of Ken Burns his newest film, the American Revolution, reveals the untold stories of people, some familiar, many forgotten, who risked everything to change the course of history. It's a story of a war that was bloody, complex and profoundly consequential. Ken Burns and co directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt shine a light on how this historic fight for independence independence lit the spark for freedom that still burns today. Stream the American Revolution on the PBS app. Don't miss it. Listen to your elders, honey. You might know them from their viral videos. But now the old gays are pulling back the curtain with their podcast Silver Linings with the Old Gays, brought to you in partnership with I Heart, Ruby Studio and Veeve Healthcare. Hosts Robert, Mick, Bill and Jose share their favorite pride, memories and the importance of celebrating all year long in honor of Palm Springs Pride. So check out Silver Linings with the Old gays on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

[Holly Fry]

And I'm Tracy B. Wilson.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

So when writing about Clarence Birdseye, who is our topic today, for his full length biography on him, author Mark Kurlansky wrote, quote, birdseye wrote numerous articles about himself and his ideas. But the subject himself is not always an infallible source either. Especially a man like Bird's Eye who had an image of himself that he wanted to promote. A very American image of. A lot of audacity not much intellect, and a pioneer spirit. The first and last of these were largely true. The second manifestly not. But regardless of whether he fudged some details in his life story to make it more appealing, Clarence Birdseye, who eventually went by Bob, and we'll mention that in the episode, really changed the way that people thought about and prepared food in the 20th century. There are, for the sake of clarity, up top, two Clarence Birdseyes. In this episode, father and son, we will refer to the main focus just as Clarence Birdseye, or sometimes Bob Birdseye Eye and his father we will refer to as Clarence Senior. Also, we have to give you a little heads up here because Birdseye was a very interesting and eccentric man, and he's often touted as a naturalist and worked as one, but maybe not the image you have in your head when you hear that word today. He was part of that era where being a naturalist often included killing animals. We're not lingering on any of that, but he did a lot of things that would be seen as deeply problematic by today's standards, particularly regarding animal cruelty. So just know that going into this.

[Holly Fry]

Episode, sorry, I was dwelling on the idea that an American image includes audacity and pioneer spirit, but not intellect. I know. Clarence Birdseye was born on December 9, 1886, in Brooklyn, New York. His father was Clarence Frank Birdseye, who was a very successful lawyer and wrote several textbooks. His mother was Ada Jane Underwood, who married Clarence Sr. In 1878 when she was 23. Birdseye grew up in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn and had eight siblings. So Clarence was the sixth of the nine total kids.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

And from an early age, Clarence was deeply interested in nature. The younger Clarence Birdseye was not an athletic boy, and instead he preferred to spend time by himself and outside on the family farm that Clarence Sr. Bought on Long island, which they called Windy Cote. His mother saw a budding naturalist in Clarence, and he seemed to agree. But this was not a case of a sensitive child who was one with nature. He was a boy who liked to shoot and hunt. When he was 10, he trapped live muskrats and shipped them to an English estate that was stocking their grounds with animals for hunting. He also advertised that he offered lessons in taxidermy.

[Holly Fry]

At the age of 11, when Clarence was in high school, the family moved to Montclair, New Jersey. One of the interesting things he did as a teenager was take a cooking class, and that was something that was considered unusual for boys at this time. He also started going by the name Bob.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Yeah, that class was part of his high school curriculum. It was kind of like opting into a home EC class that was, other than him, all girls, which is just an interesting choice, but sometimes that's cited as the beginning of his fascination with food. At the age of 19, Clarence enrolled at Amherst College in Massachusetts with the goal of getting a biology degree. This is interesting as Amherst didn't and doesn't offer science degrees. So he was still going to get a BA even with a biology major. And during college, he rescued an infestation of rats behind the Amherst butcher shop that were going to be exterminated. Exterminated. This wasn't because he was soft about animals being killed. He recognized them as being a rare species that was in danger of extinction. And he actually got Columbia University interested in this colony of rats. He got paid to ship the school a batch of them. In fact, he sort of always seemed to be mixing his love of nature with his love of a good hustle.

[Holly Fry]

He never got that college degree though. He ran out of money after his second year and he had to drop out and join the workforce. There's also some suggestion that he got hired away from his biology program by the US government and that is why he didn't finish. The idea of a financial hardship in particular is interesting because Birdseye was just, he was not from a family of humble means. His father was a high profile New York lawyer. It seems like the family did have a significant financial crisis though, and that was around the time that Birdseye dropped out of college because he didn't have money. Apparently he tried to get a loan to continue college but that loan was denied.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Yeah, there are some question marks around Clarence Sr's business dealings. We're going to talk about a big financial crisis that comes a few years later. But knowing that that one is coming, I was a little like, I wonder what exactly happened here. Birdseye, though, did get hired by the U.S. department of Agriculture after school and he was sent to the U.S. southwest for work on a biological survey. He was living in Arizona and New Mexico during this time and he also became keenly aware while he was there of the value of animal furs. And that would drive some of his moves later. He worked various jobs in New York after the survey was completed and he returned to the East Coast. But he also started a new side hustle, importing animal furs from contacts he had made in the American Southwest and then selling them in the city. He also worked in an office job for the US Department of Agriculture. But he was really too Restless to be happy working in an office during.

[Holly Fry]

This phase of his life, Clarence also met the daughter of cartographer Samuel Gannett. Eleanor Gannett was an undergrad at George Washington University when they met. That started a five year courtship before the couple married in August of 1915.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

But before that, the Department of Agriculture sent Bob Birdseye to Montana in 1910. And this actually brushes up against our recent episode on eponymous diseases because he was there to collect ticks for the study of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. We mentioned already that he loved to hunt and this job involved a lot of hunting because he collected the ticks off of wild game that he shot. He apparently throughout his life touted how lucky he was that he could hunt with no limitations while he was there. This was a job that came with a high degree of risk for all the reasons we talked about in that eponymous diseases episode. But for someone like Bird's Eye, it was also a perfect fit. In interviews throughout his life, he downplayed his work on that project as insignificant. And he tended to talk about the hunting part of it. But he is recognized as being hugely important to the study of it. That enabled treatments to be developed. Among other things, he wrote a report with recommendations on how to control the spread of Rocky Mountain spotted fever titled Some Common Mammals of Western Montana in Relation to Agriculture and Spotted Fever.

[Holly Fry]

After the study, he stayed in Montana and he continued to trap animals to eliminate predators for the local farmers. Some of this sounds really awful by modern standards, probably even standards of the time. One of his projects was testing poisons to see which of them was most effective. Reminds me a little bit of when they tried to figure out how much arsenic needed to go in the tick dip by experimentation on the animals.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Yeah. In 1912, Birdseye moved on to a new assignment in Labrador on the eastern coast of Canada. Although at the time, Newfoundland and Labrador were not part of Canada yet. Really, this assignment was an invitation proffered by Wilfred Grenfell, a British born medical missionary. Grenfell had been working in Labrador for years by this point. He worked to develop the availability of medical care and other necessities to areas that were sparsely populated and depended on fishing and trapping for food and for income. And he needed help in this work. And this was exactly the kind of job that Bird's Eye was drawn to. So it was a great fit. And these two men reportedly got along really, really well while he was there. Birdseye also taxidermied birds to send to Washington D.C. for the U.S. biological Survey. And that soon expanded to also preserving various insects and really anything that was requested.

[Holly Fry]

The trapping in particular was interesting to Bird's Eye. He saw the potential of starting a business venture if he could get investors from New York to buy in on it. After researching and studying the health and habits of foxes, he was in business as a fox breeder and a fur trader. Ultimately, new legislation in Newfoundland put an end to the fox breeding business. He did continue having them processed for fur though. Birdseye also started writing about this work and published some articles as a possible start to another career, but that did not really get off the ground.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

This was also a time when Birdseye was in a unique situation regarding food. He didn't really have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Those had to be imported at very great expense. He ate a lot of canned food, which he actually liked, and he also learned a lot about how to prepare the foods that were available locally like salmon and game in new ways. He welcomed new culinary experiences and he was willing to try just about anything. Anything. Even polar bear, seal meat and skunk.

[Holly Fry]

Coming up, we will talk about Bird's Eyes return to the us but first we will take a quick sponsor break.

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[Tracy B. Wilson]

Birdseye returned to the US in 1915, and at that point, he felt like he had made enough money through his fur business that he was ready to truly start a life with his beloved Eleanor. So once the pair got married, Bob and Eleanor planned to travel to Labrador together. This was an adjustment for Eleanor, but she completely rolled with it and she learned all the skills needed to survive in the wintry climate. By the time their first winter there was over, Eleanor was pregnant, and they returned to New York. Bob actually went back to Labrador pretty quickly. After making sure that Eleanor's needs were taken care of, the couple had made a plan. She was going to have the baby in New York, and then she would travel to Labrador once the baby was old enough to go on the journey. Their son Kellogg was born on September 6, and by mid October he and Helenor were headed north and settled into family life in the cold.

[Holly Fry]

There were a couple of different stories about what led Bird's Eye to thinking about the way foods freeze. One is that while he was ice fishing with some of the indigenous people of Labrador, he noticed that because of the freezing temperatures, fish were freezing almost as soon as they were pulled out of the water. The fish would then be stored that way, and he marveled at how fresh they tasted when they were thawed and cooked later. Another version of this is that the people who lived there were freezing their food for the harsh winters when the fresh fruits and vegetables would be less accessible. Biographer Mark Kurlansky shared in his book about bird's eye the naturalist's fascination with water, finding what he called a, quote, state of equilibrium, by which he meant that it would stabilize the point right before freezing and then would seem to freeze instantly when it was poured into another vessel.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

The reality is that Birdseye was noticing and studying all these things and performing tests on meats that were frozen at different times of the year by thinly slicing them and observing the different textures on the interior of the frozen food. He did start thinking about why the fish and other meat that he saw frozen in Canada stayed delicious, which is not the case with other frozen foods that he had experienced back home. He noticed the variables that were in place during freezing there, the temperature, the ice, and the wind. And he ruminated on these factors a lot, and he started performing his own experiments. He started first with vegetables like cabbage, and then moving up to meats. And eventually he realized that instant freezing meant that the crystals that form in those foods were much smaller and they wouldn't damage the cellular walls of the food.

[Holly Fry]

When the United States entered World War I in the spring of 1917, Birdseye returned home. But there was a more personal battle bubbling up in the Birdseye family. A news article from May of 1917 that appeared in multiple newspapers ran with the headline, quote, alleged cleanup of $1.9 million in two days. This was about the finances of the Life and Trust Company of Pittsburgh. The article read in part, quote, the institution is believed to have been wrecked, according to a statement issued. Clarence Birdseye of New York in a period of two days milked the company of $1.9 million through a board of dummy directors. Warrants have been issued for the arrest of Bird's eye and his five alleged associates, all of New York. One of those five associates was Birdseye Jr. S brother Kellogg. By the end of the year the insurance company had been liquidated and Clarence Sr. Was being sued to recover the lost money. Birdseye Sr. And Kellogg Bird's Eye were eventually sentenced to two years in prison.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Yeah. Just in case it's not obvious, the Kellogg name was popular in the Birdseye family. Both Clarence, the younger Clarence's brother and his son were named Kellogg. Birdseye Jr. Was never particularly interested in the worlds of finance and law like his father and brother. And we don't actually know what his personal feelings about all these legal troubles were. We'll talk about it some more behind the scenes, but this was not an openly demonstrative person. So we, we really don't have a lot of insight about how he felt about much of anything. It is possible that he wanted to distance himself from the entire situation. He and Eleanor and their young son chose to move to Washington D.C. as this was going on, which was close to her family rather than his. When they were there, Birdseye first worked for a construction company and then he moved on to the U.S. housing Corporation and then another shift to work for the U.S. fisheries Association.

[Holly Fry]

Working for the fisheries made Birdseye once again focus on frozen food because part of the work of the Fisheries association was looking at ways to improve the shipping of fish. As Bob Birdseye investigated the industry, he was appalled at how sloppy things were in terms of production and sanitation. He thought he could do better and ensure that clean, fresh tasting fish made it to consumers tables.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Initially he focused his work on packaging and he developed a shipping container to keep fish cold in transit. But it was not as effective as he hoped and he started to contemplate the things that he had noticed and studied when he was living in Labrador. In 1922, he quit his job to start working full time on developing his ideas for food freezing techniques. This was a huge gamble at this point. He and Eleanor had two kids and they had another on the way.

[Holly Fry]

Birdseye was not the first person to work on freezing food for the consumer market and specifically not fish. But previous efforts tended to have a bad grainy texture. Frozen food did not have good associations on the consumer market at this point, even with other inventors also trying to figure out fast freezing in 1923, Birdseye.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Drummed up investors to start his first frozen food company. This venture was focused on the food he had gained expertise in through his various jobs in the preceding years. Exclusively fish. Bird's Eye Seafood opened its door in lower Manhattan that same year. He once again focused on packaging. But he realized that innovating the container for the fish wasn't really going to solve the problems that were facing the industry. He had to rethink the freezing process on a large scale.

[Holly Fry]

In 1924, he was granted a patent for his food freezing machine. His basic process flash froze foods, which were already packed into waxed cardboard packaging. This packaged food would run through a pressurized space between two frozen plates. The process enabled the foods to be frozen so quickly that they didn't develop water crystals in them, which was part of what helped them retain their original fresh flavor. And this process worked on vegetables and fruits as well as fish. The big differentiator between Birdseye's method and his competitors was in the temperature. A lot of other companies froze their foods just below freezing. But recalling the harsh winters in Labrador, Birdseye froze his foods colder than 45 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

His patent titled method of preserving piscatorial products, which I love, makes clear that the benefit is to consumers that are not in close proximity to fresh seafood, stating quote, unquote, of great importance is the fact that the ability to freeze fish without in any way adversely affecting it as an article of food, makes it possible to supply this highly desired commodity to inland points far removed from the greater rivers and the oceans where the fish is caught. Soon, he actually had another patent for the cartons that he was using in the process.

[Holly Fry]

But though this was all clearly innovative, it was a huge step forward for frozen foods. It did not meet with success. In an echo of the abrupt end to his college education, he just ran out of money. But this time, Birdseye had insurance. Literally. He had cashed out his life insurance policy for more money so that he could keep working on his frozen seafood company. It also didn't sustain the company, though. And as 1925 loomed, the money once again ran out. This time, he sold his house and he moved the family to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to be in a port city with a busy fishing industry. He and Eleanor also had a fourth child during this financially precarious time.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Yeah, he basically was like, I'm going to keep going, so let's sell our.

[Holly Fry]

House and let's go to Gloucester.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

He clearly had a vision. Things didn't luckily stay precarious for terribly long, though, because Bird's Eye got several high profile investors, including JP Morgan, to fund a new venture. This time, he was not planning on opening a storefront to offer his frozen food product. Bob Birdseye was planning to create machines to sell to the food processing industry. By this point, the legal problems that Clarence Sr. And his brother Kellogg had been involved in had more or less been resolved. And for the first several years of this new venture, Kellogg became the vice president of Bob's new company. The new facility that he built was customized to handle the process that Birdseye had invented. And he named this new enterprise General Seafoods Corporation. And there he worked constantly to innovate what frozen food could be.

[Holly Fry]

This was an expansive effort that worked to innovate the entire seafood industry, not just in freezing, but in packaging and even prepping the product before freezing. The idea of a fish already scaled and filleted before it was frozen for an easy consumer use didn't really exist before. Birdseye worked with engineers to develop the machines that could perform those tasks.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Yeah, he had a scaler and a, you know, a fish filleter. He just invented so many pieces of this process. In 1927, he filed for another patent method of preparing food product, which he touted as follows. A method of freezing which requires more than a very short space of time for freezing impairs the natural qualities and flavors of comestibles. In the case of fish or meat, for instance, slow freezing disrupts the cells of the animal tissue with loss of the pristine qualities and flavors and rapid deterioration after thawing. By my new method, I am able, by means which are economical and commercially practical, not only to affect any desired degree of refrigeration, but to quick freeze a comestible into a compacted frozen block having comparatively fewer spaces in which the pristine qualities and flavor of the comestible are retained and remain unimpaired for a substantial period after the block has been thawed. That patent was granted in 1930. Birdseye, like many inventors we have talked about before, continued to refine his process and his machinery. And he filed a lot of update patents, including one for a continuous belt on his freezing apparatus. He didn't invent fast freezing, but he never stopped looking for ways to improve it.

[Holly Fry]

There were more things than belts that had to be refined and rethought for one. All of this innovation didn't erase the years of concerns people had developed regarding frozen foods. Birdseye kept working to address this distrust, paying for food safety tests to show the food was free from problems and contaminants. And all of the packaging had to be rethought, from plastic wraps to packaging inks. And Birdseye worked with partner companies to develop all these things. Birdseye's company still was not making any money. They needed investors or a buyout. One of the things that Bob Bird's Eye was known to do in the hopes of drumming up interest from financial sources was to send them frozen foods to show them how effective his process was.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Yeah, there are stories of him like serving big wigs of industry like fancy lunches and then saying all of this was frozen food once to watch them go ooh. Eventually that desired deal came through and it was a huge one. A company called Postum Incorporated bought Bird's Eyes Company out in 1929 for $23.5 million, which was absolutely unheard of for the time. His company had actually been valued just a couple years earlier at less than $2 million. So this seemed absolutely bananas to a lot of people. Marjorie Meriwether Post, the Postum Foods heiress who is often credited with brokering this deal is on my short list. I became very interested in her in a little side rabbit hole while I was working on this episode. But the Postum Company worked with Goldman Sachs to secure funding for this massive buyout. Part of the huge expense was that the patents were included in the deal along with all the company's machinery and other assets. Postum really thought that Clarence Birdseye had developed the future of food. Postum changed its name to General Foods Corporation shortly after the buy and started selling on the New York Stock Exchange two and a half months after the deal was announced. Within two years, as the company continued to lose money in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, Goldman Sachs let the Posts buy out their shares in the company.

[Holly Fry]

We'll talk about how Birds Eyes life changed once he was a millionaire. But first we will hear from the sponsors that keep the show going.

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[Hari Kondabolu]

On the Podcast Health Stuff we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night.

[Dr. Priyanka Walley]

Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wal, a double board certified physician.

[Hari Kondabolu]

And I'm Hari Kondabolu, a comedian and someone who once googled do I have scurvy?

[Dr. Priyanka Walley]

At 3am on health stuff, we're talking about health in a different way.

[Hari Kondabolu]

It's not only about what we can do to improve our health, but also.

[Dr. Priyanka Walley]

What our health says about us and the way we're living.

[Hari Kondabolu]

Like our episode where we look at.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Diabetes in the United states.

[Dr. Priyanka Walley]

I mean, 50% of Americans are pre diabetic.

[Hari Kondabolu]

How preventable is type 2?

[Holly Fry]

Extremely.

[Dr. Priyanka Walley]

Or our in depth analysis of how incredible mangoes are.

[Hari Kondabolu]

Oh, it's hard to explain to rest of the world that like your mangoes are fine because mangoes are incredible. But like you don't even know.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

You don't know.

[Hari Kondabolu]

You don't know.

[Dr. Priyanka Walley]

It's going to be a fun ride. So tune in.

[Hari Kondabolu]

Listen to health stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

She said Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night.

[Liberty Mutual Advertiser]

Along the Central Texas plains, teens are dying, suicides that don't make sense, strange accidents and brutal murders in what seems to be a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people.

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There are people out there that absolutely know what happened.

[Liberty Mutual Advertiser]

Listen to Paper Ghosts, the Texas teen murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Smith]

I'm Robert Smith and this is Jacob Goldstein and we used to host a show called Planet Money.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history.

[Robert Smith]

And some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all.

[Jacob Goldstein]

It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode, how Southwest Airlines used cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business.

[Robert Smith]

The most Texas story ever.

[Jacob Goldstein]

There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons.

[Robert Smith]

So many robber barons.

[Holly Fry]

And you know what?

[Robert Smith]

They're not all bad.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked, like Thomas Edison and the electric chair. Listen to business history on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Clarence Birdseye maintained a role in the General Foods Corporation after the buyout, working as president of the division that retained the name Bird's Eye Frosted Foods, and then he also worked as a high level consultant. Because of the timing of that buyout, he managed to weather the Great Depression quite well as he had a steady salary with the company and he was able to continue his work developing new areas of the frozen food market. He also built himself a beautiful new house in the early 1930s while most people were struggling, he continued to hunt game because he loved it, sometimes shooting things right from his porch. Although he was certainly wealthy enough to not need to hunt for food, he.

[Holly Fry]

Also managed to keep a couple dozen other people employed in his lab at a time when jobs were really sparse. A lot of the techniques used in the frozen food industry today were initially worked out in his Gloucester lab, like keeping fruit from browning by using ascorbic acid.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Yeah, it's just vitamin C. What the Postum Company had brought to that huge deal that Birds Eye had never really managed well on his own was advertising and public relations. Over the course of several years. Immediately after the buyout, newspapers started running stories about a new quick freezing process that kept foods tasting fresh. The Baltimore sun, for example, ran a piece in November of 1929 titled Food that Is Fresh Though Frozen, New Preserving Process Aims to Maintain Cell Structure Already the tide was turning in the way frozen food was perceived, as evidenced by this passage from the article, the quick freezing principle seems so simple and its advantages so great that one's imagination need not be stretched at all to visualize many startling outgrowths of its adoption of fresh food distributing agencies. With the airplane to furnish quick transportation and the light practicable packages possible where no refrigerant is required, the range of fancy fresh meats and fruits made available to centers of population is vastly expanded.

[Holly Fry]

You heard that right at the time there was a belief that the food packaging could be all that was needed to keep the frozen food ice cold. That same article notes quote, it is asserted the excessive coldness of the food packaging itself makes it possible to hold it for days without icing or other refrigerant mere packing an insulated, nearly airtight container such as a sealed corrugated pasteboard carton is all that is necessary to assure first class condition for long periods.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

We know that was wrong, but at the time it seemed feasible. Even with the PR know how of the Postum team, frozen food still had a slow acceptance rate. A handful of grocery stores, and I mean a handful, it was less than a dozen, agreed to stock frozen foods through their company, but it was a really hard sell. Customers came in and they asked a lot of questions, but purchases were a lot less frequent. Over time, though, the numbers crept up. But General Foods spent a lot of money to get those numbers, including supplying the costly refrigerated cases that the food could be stocked in. Those cases cost $1,500 each, but they were also expensive for the store because they used a lot of electricity. This caused a whole lot of consternation in the industry. So eventually Bird's Eye Foods contracted with another company to make less burdensome freezers. They were less expensive for Bird's Eye, and then they rented those to the stores and they were less expensive to run. So the end result was a better financial situation for everyone.

[Holly Fry]

In 1935, Birdseye founded the Birdseye Electric Company. It started with a desire to add reflectors to the insides of light bulbs to offer greater illumination for display uses. He patented the reflecting electric lamp in 1935, and it has continued to be used to the present day. He sold the electrical company to Wabash Appliance Corporation in 1939.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Also in 1939, he invented a gravity froster which froze individual items a single piece at a time. That sounds like it would be slow and weird, but it was totally automated, so ultimately it ended up being faster than previous freezing machines. It also needed less effort from an operator, so one person could run multiple machines at a time. This turned into a new company that built and leased the gravity frost machine to other companies that were making frozen food.

[Holly Fry]

In 1938, interest in frozen food had grown to the point that a magazine called Quick Frozen Foods was launched. Birdseye was not the one who started it, but he did serve as an advisor. This was one of many things he became involved in as frozen foods became more of an established industry and he had more time for other projects. One of the other things he was involved in was whaling. He had invented a harpoon that had a thrust mechanism to give it greater force than throwing a harpoon by hand. That same year, his advocacy helped initiate an update to the Pure Food and Drug act. Of 1906, which put stronger requirements in place for quality standards related to frozen foods, Something that he and other people in the industry saw as vital to rehabilitating the way frozen food was perceived.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Birdseye once again innovated the way frozen foods were offered in 1944. At that point, he started exploring refrigerated train cars As a way to ship foods. He ended up leasing boxcars that the Bird's Eye frozen food company could pack and prep. This was a huge moment in the way frozen foods were handled, because it made it possible for companies like Bird's eye to vastly expand their customer territory. And it inspired a lot of other companies to start thinking about similar initiatives.

[Holly Fry]

In 1949, he started working on dehydrating foods. This work started out simply just with a hot plate flipped to be an overhead heater for some cubed bread and an electric fan blowing on the cubes at the same time. From those basic beginnings, he started to combine various methods being employed by other people working in the field to fine tune his quote, anhydrous food preparation. Over the course of six years, he started a company and marketed it and got some interest. But the novelty kind of wore off, and Birdseye recognized that it would take a massive effort to get anhydrous food to be anywhere near as successful as frozen food. He turned his focus to other things, Including Holly's beloved topic of hydroponics. He was one of the early proponents of the idea that cities like New York could produce all the food plants they needed if they converted the rooftops to hydroponic gardens.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

But at this point, Bird's Eye was also starting to slow down. He developed angina, and he was encouraged to relax and stop his constant, busy ways for the benefit of his heart health. This is actually the opposite of what people with angina would be told today, but at the time, that's what the medical advice was. So this resulted in an interest in gardening, which his wife, Eleanor, was already very interested in. The couple ended up co authoring a book titled Growing woodland plants in 1951.

[Holly Fry]

Over his life, Birdseye was granted hundreds of patents, almost 300. Some of these were improvements to existing inventions, but others were ventures into areas that were completely separate from his food processing work. In the early 1950s, Bird's Eye started working on another project, which was making paper, but not in any way that it had been made before. He was working on a way to make paper pulp using leftover cane stalk scrap that remained after sugar production. He got a financial backer, which was W.R. grace & Co. Who produced sugar. This resulted in a late in life move for Bob and Eleanor. They went to Peru where the Grace company had huge sugar cane fields and had built a paper plant.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

In 1955, the bird's eyes moved back to New York where Bob's work with the Grace company shifted to marketing the new process he had developed over the preceding several years. But while those efforts were underway, his health took a sharp decline and he died of heart failure on October 7, 1956. Birdseye had received an honorary degree from Amherst 15 years earlier, and in his end of life planning, he requested that instead of flowers, anyone wishing to pay their respects should donate to a college fund that he established at the school to prevent other students from cutting their education short as he had done.

[Holly Fry]

Today, 99% of households in the U. S report purchasing frozen foods and the global frozen food industry is valued at more than $230 billion.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Yeah, he was right. He made some scary moves, but he was ultimately right. And even Postum's buyout, which a lot of people kind of criticized them over and being like, why did you pay $23 million for a company that's not worth two? And they were like, we see the future. And they were right. Listen, it takes a lot of bravado to gamble that way. It might take some people a little bit of bravado to deal with today's listener mail because it's about spiders. This is from our listener, Shandra and I love it. Shandra writes, since you were talking about spiders a few weeks ago in a behind the scenes episode, I wanted to share a couple of pictures from New Mexico. The first is a cat faced spider which is a type of orb weaver. It's been hanging out on my patio for weeks, maybe months at this point. I watched it clean a fallen leaf out of its web one day. Neat creature. It's absolutely adorable in my opinion. Its little badonk looks like a kitty face. Come on, who don't want that? The second picture is only the second tarantula I've ever seen. It's cool to see them walking down the trail. That is all. Happy October. Look at that pretty tarantula. I know not everybody loves a tarantula. I think they're very beautiful. We all know I love spiders. Tarantula is very cute. When I was very, very tiny, I lived in Arizona and I loved seeing the tarantulas running around like after the rare rain, they would all come up from their little burrows and be in the straight and I thought it was the cutest thing ever because I was a weird child. I don't know what else to tell you. If you were a weird child who loved tarantulas or if you're a weird child now, or if you just love tarantulas or anything else, you can write and tell us about that. You can do that@history podcastheartradio.com you can also subscribe to the show if you haven't gotten around to that yet. That is easy as pie to do on the iHeartRadio app or really anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

[Holly Fry]

Stuff youf Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

And now Superhuman Shack I keep telling.

[Sleep Apnea PSA Speaker]

Them not to say that. I'm no superhuman. Believe it or not, I struggle with moderate obstructive sleep Apnea or OSA in adults with obesity. Moderate to severe OSA is a condition where breathing is interrupted during sleep, with loud snoring, choking, gasping for air, and even daytime fatigue. Let's just say it can sound a lot like this. Sound familiar? Learn more@don'tsleeponosa.com this information is provided by.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Lilly, a medicine company.

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Here we have the Limu Imu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

[Liberty Mutual Advertiser]

Cut the camera. They see us.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com.

[Liberty Mutual Advertiser]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

By Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts.

[Hari Kondabolu]

On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night.

[Dr. Priyanka Walley]

I'm Dr. Priyanka Wali, a double board certified physician.

[Hari Kondabolu]

And I'm Hari Kundabolu, a comedian and someone who once googled Do I have scurvy at 3am and on our show we're talking about health in a different way. Like our episode where we look at.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Diabetes in the United states.

[Dr. Priyanka Walley]

I mean, 50% of Americans are pre diabetic.

[Hari Kondabolu]

How preventable is type 2?

[Holly Fry]

Extremely.

[Dr. Priyanka Walley]

Listen to Health Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

She said Johnny the kids didn't come home last night.

[Liberty Mutual Advertiser]

Along the Central Texas plains, teens are dying, suicides that don't make sense, strange accidents and brutal murders in what seems to be a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad Drugs alcohol trafficking of people.

[Washable Sofas Advertiser]

There are people out there that absolutely know what happened.

[Liberty Mutual Advertiser]

Listen to Paper Ghosts, the Texas Teen murders on the iHeartRadio Apple app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Holly Fry]

This is an I heart podcast.