Clarence Birdseye - Early Life

Early Life

Clarence Birdseye was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 9, 1886, the sixth of nine children of Clarence Frank Birdseye I and Ada Jane Underwood. Birdseye was briefly a student at Amherst College, dropping out sometime about 1908 (the exact date is uncertain) due to financial difficulties. He subsequently moved west for the United States Agriculture Department. He worked in New Mexico and Arizona as an “assistant naturalist”, a job, that involved killing off coyotes. He also worked in Montana with Entomologist Willard Van Orsdel King (1888-1970), where, in 1910 and 1911 Birdseye captured several hundred small mammals, and King removed several thousand ticks for research, isolating them as the cause of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

Birdseye's next field assignment, off and on from 1912 to 1915, was in Labrador in the Dominion of Newfoundland (now part of Canada), where he became further interested in food preservation by freezing, especially fast freezing. He was taught by the Inuit how to ice fish under very thick ice. In -40°C weather, he discovered that the fish he caught froze almost instantly, and, when thawed, tasted fresh. He recognized immediately, that the frozen seafood sold in New York was of lower quality than the frozen fish of Labrador, and saw that applying this knowledge would be lucrative. His journals from this period, which record these observations, are held in the Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College.

Conventional freezing methods of the time were commonly done at higher temperatures, and thus the freezing occurred much more slowly, giving ice crystals more time to grow. It is now known that fast freezing produces smaller ice crystals, which cause less damage to the tissue structure. When 'slow' frozen foods thaw, cellular fluids leak from the ice crystal-damaged tissue, giving the resulting food a mushy or dry consistency upon preparation. Birdseye solved this problem.

In 1922 Birdseye conducted fish-freezing experiments at the Clothel Refrigerating Company, then established his own company, Birdseye Seafoods Inc., to freeze fish fillets with chilled air at -45°F (-43°C). In 1924 his company went bankrupt for lack of consumer interest in the product. That same year he developed an entirely new process for commercially viable quick-freezing: Packing fish in cartons, then freezing the contents between two refrigerated surfaces under pressure. Birdseye created a new company, General Seafood Corporation, to promote this method.