Birds Eye

The logo of Birds Eye Foods, one of the world’s leading makers of frozen foods, features a stylized bird with a prominent eye. But the brand’s name actually has little to do with birds. Muskrats, maybe, but not birds.

Clarence Birdseye (one word) was born in Brooklyn in 1886, and spent his summers on a Long Island farm. Clarence was a born naturalist, and at the tender age of ten he found a way to combine his love of the outdoors with a little free enterprise by trapping and selling muskrats. Young Clarence then used the proceeds of his business to buy a shotgun, presumably making the muskrats even more nervous. A few years later, at Amherst College and strapped for cash, Clarence dusted off his trapping skills and financed his education by selling rats to a Columbia University geneticist.

After a variety of jobs, many of which seemed to involve trapping small animals, Clarence found himself in Labrador and made an interesting discovery: animals frozen quickly in the deep winter tasted better than those frozen more slowly in milder weather. Although preserving food by freezing dated back to at least 1626 and the first commercial frozen food hit the market in 1875, Clarence believed that he had discovered how to make frozen food actually taste good.

Back home in the U.S., Clarence experimented with quick-freezing techniques and finally succeeded in 1923, freezing rabbit and fish fillets in candy boxes using dry ice. In 1924, Clarence established the General Seafoods Company (later Birdseye Foods) to further develop his technology and market both frozen foods and freezers, and the frozen food industry was off and running.

A few years and a few mergers later, Birdseye Foods was acquired by General Foods Corporation, who changed the name of Clarence’s company to “Birds Eye.” Clarence himself supported the change, noting that “Birds Eye” was the original form of his family name. Evidently an early Birdseye ancestor had once saved the life of an English queen by shooting an attacking hawk square in the eye.

Clarence Birdseye continued to work in frozen food technology and developed inventions in many other fields (a harpoon gun, a revolutionary fishing reel, and a new papermaking process) until his death in 1956, by which time he had amassed over 300 patents and an unknown number of muskrats.

February 28, 2008 | Filed Under Food and Drink 

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