Ikea
It’s like The Little Match Girl, but with a happy ending. In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fable, a poor urchin perishes after being sent out on the frozen city streets to sell matches. But in the IKEA story, an enterprising farm boy builds match-selling into a global empire.
Born in 1926 in the Swedish village of Agunnaryd, young Ingvar Kamprad got his start in business by riding his bicycle from farm to farm selling wooden matches to his neighbors. Once everyone had a supply of matches, Ingvar wisely decided to diversify his offerings, and soon was pedaling around the countryside delivering Christmas tree ornaments, ball point pens and, though it must have been a bit awkward, fresh fish. By age 17, Ingvar had formed his own company and named it IKEA, an acronym made up of his own initials, the name of his family’s farm (Elmtaryd), and the village of his birth, Agunnaryd.
Delivering his product line (which now included picture frames, watches and jewelry) by bicycle was no longer practical, so Ingvar transformed IKEA into a mail-order operation, and by 1948 was also selling furniture produced by local artisans. So successful was his low-priced but sturdy line of furniture that by 1951 Ingvar had dropped all his other products and decided to concentrate on inexpensive but stylish home furnishings. IKEA today operates stores in more than 30 countries around the world, selling about 12,000 different products (but not, oddly enough, bicycles).
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.
A-1 Steak Sauce
Henderson William Brand had a tough audience. As chef to England’s King George IV in 1824, Brand was constantly striving to please the royal palate with new concoctions, and one day served the King a new sauce he had developed for use on steak. The King was so pleased with Brand’s invention that he bestowed the accolade “A-1,” meaning ‘the very best,” on the sauce. When Brand left the King’s service a few years later, he took both the recipe for the sauce and the King’s name for it with him and began to market the sauce and other recipes as Brand & Co.
Unfortunately, Brand proved a better cook than a businessman, and Brand & Co. went bankrupt, leaving Brand no recourse but to sell the business to his friend W.H. Withall. In 1862, Withall entered the sauce in the International Exposition in London, where it again earned the rating of “A-1.”
Within a few years Withall had sold Brand & Co. to another company, precipitating an eight-year legal battle with a very annoyed Brand, but by the late 1800s the dust had settled and A-1 Steak Sauce was on its way to becoming the most popular meat sauce in both Britain and North America. Now owned by Intercorp Excelle Inc., A-1 is touted as being excellent on fish, poultry and vegetables as well as steak, but the recipe remains a closely-guarded secret (although the company will admit to the “core ingredients” of both the Original and Zesty A-1 varieties as being malt vinegar, dates, mango chutney, apples and orange marmalade).