Clarence Birdseye was a very curious human and this lead him to owning 168 patents. To think he started as an 11 year old taxidermy teacher.
Dave Young:
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Dave Young:
Hey, welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here. Steve Semple is here as well. And just a few seconds ago, Steve told me we’re going to be talking about Birds Eye. Birds Eye, the frozen food company from my childhood. Pretty sure they’ve been around that long.
Stephen Semple:
Oh, they’ve been around that long, because you know, you do have gray hair and all, but they’ve been around that long. They were founded in 1922, Dave.
Dave Young:
Oh, okay. Okay, okay. Okay. So I’m going to put the pieces together, based on them being founded in 1922 and what made Birds Eye, Birds Eye. And I’m going to take a wild guess. You ready?
Stephen Semple:
I’m ready.
Dave Young:
I think they had something to do with either the invention or the popularization of frozen food.
Stephen Semple:
A bit of both actually.
Dave Young:
Okay.
Stephen Semple:
So well done. Well done.
Dave Young:
I’m just going by the time. There was no air conditioning or refrigeration to speak of before that time.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. There you go. You put together the pieces nicely.
Dave Young:
Thanks for joining us and that’s all.
Stephen Semple:
That’s it, right? It’s interesting the evolution of this company, because it was founded in 1922 by Clarence Birdseye.
Dave Young:
Really, that was his name?
Stephen Semple:
That was his name. Clarence Birdseye.
Dave Young:
Oh, I’m glad. Okay.
Stephen Semple:
And in 1929, so seven years later, Clarence sold Birds Eye to Post Consumer Brands for 23 and a half million dollars in 1929.
Dave Young:
1920. Gosh, I hope he kept it through the crash.
Stephen Semple:
It turns out that he did.
Dave Young:
Oh good.
Stephen Semple:
He got it pre-crash and he did very well. He also stayed on with the company, stayed on with Post Consumer Brands for a salary of $50,000 a year, which was a big deal in the thirties. Right.
Dave Young:
23 million in the bank and 50 grand a year. He’s doing okay.
Stephen Semple:
And what makes him famous is he really was the inventor of the modern method of doing frozen food. And today frozen food is a $220 billion a year industry. And when he passed away at the age of 69, he had 168 patents to his name.
Dave Young:
168 patents.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Yeah.
Dave Young:
That’s a big deal.
Stephen Semple:
That is a big deal. Now he’s also, Dave, he’s our type of guy. A few years before his death, a reporter at the American Magazine asked him sort of like, “What’s the secret to your success?”. And he said, this is quote, “When I arrive in a strange city, I go through the local industrial plants to see how they make things. I don’t care what the product is, I’m as interested in the manufacturer of chewing gum as of steel.”.
Dave Young:
Nice. They would just let him wander into a factory and see?
Stephen Semple:
I guess. But what I liked is this whole idea that when he is somewhere strange, he just will always look around at things. And when Clarence Birdseye was young, he spent lots of his time trying to figure out how to make money off of the world around him. So at 10, he noticed a ton of muskrats in a nearby field, and he wrote the local zoo to see if they’re interested in having some muskrats. And they said, “Sure.”, so he ended up trapping them and selling them to the zoo for a buck a piece.
Dave Young:
Okay. I don’t know you could get away with that today.
Stephen Semple:
Well, you know, twenties, right? He later did this with frogs and made a hundred bucks, and by age 11 he launched a taxidermy school and even placed an ad for students in the magazine. Now, can you imagine the surprise-
Dave Young:
He’s teaching taxidermy when he’s 11?
Stephen Semple:
At 11. Could you imagine the surprise when you sign up for a course, find out you’re being taught by an 11-year-old?
Dave Young:
All right, now I’m a little worried that he went into frozen foods.
Stephen Semple:
So once he was old enough, he enrolled in Amherst College in Massachusetts, but his family fell on some challenges, so he had to dropout. So he joined the US biology survey, and this took him to the American Southwest where he developed another side hustle, selling coyote pelts to New Yorkers at a 60% profit margin. So he kept doing these things, but then in the spring of 1912, Birdseye was moved to Labrador.
Dave Young:
Wait, I’m trying to think of where Labrador is. Is that Canada?
Stephen Semple:
That’s Canada.
Dave Young:
Okay.
Stephen Semple:
And it’s a fairly northern part of Canada. So if you basically take a look at the northern part of Canada on the East Coast, that’s basically where Labrador is. It’s basically as far north as Newfoundland. If you go to Newfoundland and go left, you hit Labrador. So, cold.
Dave Young:
Yeah. Yeah. And we were wondering why he came up with frozen food, because all his food was frozen.
Stephen Semple:
There you go. Because when he was in Labrador, he started capturing silver foxes, first for breeding, and later for furs, he made six grand in profit doing that. Here’s where things became interesting. While in Labrador, Birdseye became fascinated with food preservation, especially how the Inuit did it.
Dave Young:
Okay.
Stephen Semple:
Because what he would notices is that as soon as a fish was pulled out from under the ice, it would immediately freeze, like mid-flip. Like it’s minus 40 degree Fahrenheit and the fish would come out and freeze instantly. This fish would then be packed in the snow outdoors and what Birdseye noticed was when you thawed it, it was perfectly fresh days, even weeks later. And back in the US, freezing food was nowhere as good. It was terrible in fact. The process at the time was to freeze food slowly over a period of days, just below the freezing point. That was how food was frozen. And when food is frozen this way, it’s grainy and gross and frankly unhealthy. It was so bad. Here’s how bad that food was. It was so bad, it was banned from being served in New York State prisons. When it’s not good enough to be served in a prison, it’s pretty bad. Especially in a prison in 1910.
So in 1917, he returns to the United States, and he’s working with the US Fisheries Association and the goal was to find a better way to get fish to the market in better condition. And freezing is one of the things being studied. And here’s what Birdseye observed, when flash frozen, the ice crystals are tiny. When frozen slowly, the ice crystals are large and that’s what basically makes for the better preservation of food. So Clarence Birdseye then struggled to recreate flash freezing in the conditions he saw in Labrador.
So in 1922, he left the association and figured this out. He raised 20 grand, rented a warehouse and started studying the problem full time. As you said, at this time, there wasn’t air conditioners, there wasn’t portable freezing, like this would’ve been a big challenge in 1922 and he spent two years on this and he tried a bunch of things, ran out of cash. He then moved to a fishing town in Gloucester, Massachusetts, raised more money, this time he raised $375,000 and he launched General Seafood Company. And it was kind of smart. Smart place to go to raise money for freezing fish, right? Hey, you guys catch fish. You need a better way to get to market. Let me help you. Right?
Dave Young:
You seem to have a lot of fish laying around.
Stephen Semple:
Seem to have a lot of fish laying around, and I’m going to help you get it to market. So he launched General Seafood Company and he soon had a breakthrough. And what he figured out was by placing food inside two inch thick, insulated cartons and pressing them between hollowed out metal, that’s cooled to minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit, he found he could flash freeze the content.
Dave Young:
Okay.
Stephen Semple:
He then figured out how to swap the metal plates for chilled belts. This allowed rapid production. So basically you put the fish on his belt. It would go through. This method was dubbed the multi-plate freezing. Birdseye’s invention was ahead of its time, but it also caused a bunch of new challenges. Although Birdseye solved the frozen food problem, America didn’t have the infrastructure to distribute it. Trains didn’t have freezer carts, warehouses weren’t quite cold enough and retailers had no way to stock it.
Dave Young:
Okay. Yeah, yeah.
Stephen Semple:
He was kind of on the bleeding edge of technology, because by 1927 he now had a ton of frozen food, but with nowhere to go. He was stuck, but he got lucky, because in 1928, the storefront freezer was invented.
Dave Young:
Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.
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Stephen Semple:
What he also noticed was it was a new piece of technology, so there was resistance by the stores to buy it. So he went out and bought the machines and installed them all over grocery stores in the east.
Dave Young:
So that he could put his product in them?
Stephen Semple:
So he could put his product in it. And within two years, he had 27 products. So he expanded the products beyond fish, including peas and other vegetables. And then along comes 1929 and he’s handed 23 and a half million dollars, plus a nice salary and a job.
Dave Young:
You know what’s cool too? Is they kept the name. They didn’t just roll him into the… Wait, who bought him? General Foods?
Stephen Semple:
Post Consumer Brands.
Dave Young:
Post, the big food conglomerates, and they kept the Birds Eye name on it. That’s a nice gesture as well.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. And what I found really interesting, and again, it’s a lesson that we see over and over again. Look, he was a really industrious guy. He did all sorts of things like this. Like at 11, offering a taxidermy school, which is to me just hilarious. But he observed somewhere else, something somewhere else. So while in Labrador he observed, “Wow. When this fish is frozen this way, it’s delicious. How can I make that happen?”. And basically pursued that objective. And it’s amazing how often this is where these innovations come from. He wasn’t in the food industry, he wasn’t in the grocery industry, he wasn’t in the distribution industry. He was a guy who worked for the fisheries industry and noticed, “Wow, when fish is frozen this way, look how delicious it is. I’m going to figure out how to do that.”.
Dave Young:
And just his natural curiosity, making the pivot to, we can freeze a fish between these two plates. A lot of people would say, “Well, we just need more big frozen plates.”. Right?
Stephen Semple:
Great observation.
Dave Young:
Instead, he decides, “No, we need a conveyor belt made out of frozen plates, that we can just keep putting fish through.”.
Stephen Semple:
That is a fantastic, fantastic observation. Yeah.
Dave Young:
So just his natural curiosity. This comes back to just being somebody that’s really good at the problem topology mapping, as we like to call it. Right?
Stephen Semple:
Yeah.
Dave Young:
Somebody solved this problem somewhere else. Somebody else solved a food packaging problem that required a moving conveyor belt. The Inuit solved a problem of, “Hey, how do we enjoy a frozen fish, after it’s thawed out again?”. All of a sudden your peanut butter’s in my chocolate.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah.
Dave Young:
I don’t know where I’m going with that.
Stephen Semple:
And the other thing is, he also did get a little bit lucky, because he was on the bleeding edge of technology, because he solved the frozen fish problem before there was a distribution. But he also acted quickly. He didn’t wait for freezers to be purchased. Once he noticed, “Holy smokes, those are available. I’ll just buy them and put them in the stores.”. Lots of other people would be like, “Well, let’s educate the stores on it.”. And while that would’ve eventually, definitely occurred, that could have taken many more years.
Dave Young:
Well, he recognized that he’s in the food business, not the freezer business.
Stephen Semple:
Yes, yes.
Dave Young:
He’s not in the grocer freezer business. And so if grocers don’t have that, man, that’s a big hill to climb to just assemble a sales force to go out and sell freezers to people, so that you can sell them food.
Stephen Semple:
Another great observation, Dave, when you said he saw himself as being in the frozen food business, it could have been easy for him to see himself in the frozen fish business, but within two years he had 27 products that included vegetables and things along that line.
Dave Young:
Oh, yeah.
Stephen Semple:
So he definitely saw himself in the frozen food business and that shaped much of what he did.
Dave Young:
And what a change. You think about the time before frozen food and the time after frozen food, it would just be seasonal. You want peas and carrots, eat them when they’re in season.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, exactly. Or canned.
Dave Young:
Or canned, yeah. Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
Yuck.
Dave Young:
Canned peas.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah.
Dave Young:
But, you and I grew up with our moms pulling out the little frozen package of Birds Eye peas or broccoli, all the different things that came. I remember, they were like little cardboard bricks.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, absolutely. What really caught my attention was this whole idea of his nature of observing somewhere else and given that he created so many other patents, and the quote with American Magazine, it was in his DNA that he would go and look at things outside of his place, outside of his industry and look for ideas that he could apply. And that is often the pathway to success. Not looking around inside your industry or inside your city, but looking somewhere else.
Dave Young:
I’m glad to know the story of Clarence Birdseye. I hope one of those patents was for a muskrat trap.
Stephen Semple:
You never know. Who knows?
Dave Young:
How cool would that be? Thank you for sharing the story of Clarence Birdseye, Stephen.
Stephen Semple:
All right, thanks David.
Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to [email protected].
