When was birds eye founded

Birdseye He developed two patents, aimed at fish products. His first patent used calcium Chloride to chill C. It was this patent that created the basis for all multiple plate freezers It was this method that resulted in much smaller ice crystals forming on freezing resulting in retaining product integrity on thawing Smethursts a Grimsby fish company were amongst others experimenting with quick freezing using cold air blast tunnels, this company subsequently became part of Birds Eye, when Unilever purchased the brand.

Since their introduction, more than 15 billion fish fingers have been sold in the UK alone! This allowed subsequent packing to be planned in throughout the year. Flexible packaging lent itself to high speed packing. This also removed many of the labour constraints imposed by having to pack within the pea season. He was played by actor John Hewer until when he officially retired. Our first and the first colour advert in the UK went out in this year.

The way people purchased their food changed in the 70's. The 70's saw a massive rise in the amount of supermarkets in the UK. Birds Eye was amongst the first companies to introduce nutritional information on the packaging. This was before the legal requirement to do so. Captain Birds Eye was voted the most recognised sea captain after Captain Cook in a poll. Both companies were active in the fruit and vegetable growing regions in central and western New York State. They and other food processors were adjusting to the end of lucrative government contracts for canned food during World War II.

With sales down, companies found fixed and overhead costs rising. A shakeout of the regional industry was inevitable, with resulting mergers among rivals. All of the owners of these companies were approaching retirement age, so their main goal was to find a buyer for their companies. Additional aims were locating capital to fund the purchase of new labor-saving equipment and obtaining an increased market share in the expanding frozen food business.

The obstacle was continuing price-cutting in the marketplace, which further dented already slender profit lines achieved by each company. The merger talks did not progress well. GLF of Ithaca, New York, was recruited in early to seek ways to establish a joint venture of farmers and processors involving the three companies. That year, the death of George W. Haxton led to the withdrawal of Haxton Foods from the joint venture talks.

Further study concluded that the best solution would be to merge Curtice Brothers and Burns-Alton into a new operating company with a contractual arrangement with an agricultural cooperative, owned and operated by farmers. By March 31, , more than central and western New York state fruit and vegetable farmers had bought common stock in Pro-Fac.

They pledged to deliver a predetermined tonnage of raw produce to the cooperative over the next three years. This agreement meant that Curtice-Burns would be incorporated to process and sell products grown and delivered by Pro-Fac Cooperative. Haxton Foods brought to the deal such branded products as its Blue Boy food line as well as several operating plants.

Beginning in , Curtice-Burns, under the leadership of President Stanley Macklem, set about becoming a regionally focused company. The idea was to operate a series of small, locally based businesses on a cost-effective basis, enabling Curtice-Burns to become a national force serving regional markets in ways that large, national competitors could not.

The company came by this strategy the hard way. Beginning as a processor and marketer of Pro-Fac products, Curtice-Burns served the private-label business, marketing canned string beans, beets, corn, and applesauce to supermarket chains such as Shop Rite Foods Inc. Selling private-label products was profitable when national brands were in short supply. But in periods of oversupply, Curtice-Burns suffered. In , for example, the company's second year of business, prices for private-label food products plummeted, and the company lost money.

Worse, Pro-Fac growers received 15 percent below the average market price for their raw product. Curtice-Burns sought to establish a regional edge to stabilize its earnings. A mere 10 percent fluctuation in the national supply of a product group could greatly alter a company's profit and loss statement.

The unpredictability of supplies is often driven by crop yields, themselves subject to weather and annual planting patterns. A plan to diversify regionally allowed Curtice-Burns to give Pro-Fac members more than full market value for their raw product in all but two years between and Curtice-Burns began offering frozen vegetable products with regional appeal, marketing, for example, southern-style frozen vegetables in the southern United States.

The company also could provide quick delivery of products. In Morton Adams, who had been executive vice-president of Burns-Alton when it merged with Curtice Brothers in , became president of Curtice-Burns. The company also added can-maker Finger Lakes Packaging to its operations portfolio. Ritter Company, headquartered in Bridgeton, New Jersey.

Along with Indiana-based subsidiary Brooks Foods, P. J Ritter made branded tomato ketchup and specialty bean products under the Brooks label. Acquiring them allowed Curtice-Burns to further diversify regionally in the United States and decrease its weather and national oversupply risks by adding branded commodity products and growing areas to its portfolio.

Snyder's packaged its chip products in foil bags aimed at the convenience food market. The company also sold other potato chip, corn chip, and snack products. The proceeds of the issue helped in that year's purchase of Michigan Fruit Canners, headquartered in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

The acquired company's products, marketed mainly under the Thank You brand label, brought Curtice-Burns into markets ranging from Denver to Pittsburgh and Atlanta. Bought from W. Nalley's brand products were sold mostly in the western U. Early in the following year, the company's stock gained a listing on the American Stock Exchange.

More companies were brought under the Curtice-Burns umbrella in the ensuing years. In the company acquired Nalley's Canada Ltd. Curtice-Burns had by now installed Hugh Cummings as president of the company.

For the first time, Curtice-Burns had entered into the branded soft drinks market, initially in New York State. Earnings at Curtice-Burns were dented by the early s slowdown in the U. Curtice-Burns recognized, however, that a slumping market is a good time to buy struggling rivals.

In January , the National Oats Co. National Oats produced milled oat food products and corn for popping. Curtice-Burns's U. Renamed the Southern Frozen Foods division of Curtice-Burns, the newly acquired company sold primarily McKenzie's brand southern-style frozen vegetables in 11 southeastern states.

The acquired company served markets in the western United States from its Sodus, Michigan headquarters. The acquisitions were meant to serve the company's long-term growth.

As company President David McDonald expressed in , "Our principal focus in any year is not on short term earnings, but on the structuring of Curtice-Burns in a manner that will, over the long term, maintain a rate of growth that is at the top of the industry.

Lowrey's was the leading maker of meat snack products, including beef jerky, for which Curtice-Burns became the largest supplier in the U. The two companies later merged to form the Curtice-Burns Meat Snacks division. Other important acquisitions in this period were Adams, a producer of natural branded peanut butter, and Farman Brothers Pickle Co.

Another niche market was Mexican frozen food products, part of the larger frozen dinner market then becoming popular in the United States. Sales of frozen Mexican food were then increasing 16 percent annually in the U. Eighty percent of sales was made in the growing San Francisco and Los Angeles markets. The company also was making cuts wherever possible to remain a low-cost producer. Due to a variety of factors, mainly competitive, Curtice-Burns exited the branded soft drinks market in when it sold its National Brands Beverage business to 11 separate bottlers.

Perhaps more important, the company was focusing on growing low per capita food categories in its regional brand marketing. Although small in size, Curtice-Burns believed no food processing giant could make inroads in such markets by advertising on television at great cost. The battleground for products such as sauerkraut and fruit toppings shifted from the living room to the grocery store shelf, where Curtice-Burns's cost-effective operations could successfully outplay bigger companies in the market.

By now, the Pro-Fac Cooperative numbered members; Curtice-Burns itself had more than 7, full and seasonal employees on its payroll. The early effects of the recession in North American markets was being felt.

Curtice-Burns's acquisitions continued apace. Maxson Co. The meals consisted of three basic dishes — meat, vegetables and a potato — on a paperboard tray treated with Bakelite resin. According to the April issue of Popular Mechanics , until then, crew members and passengers had only had the choice of cold sandwiches and K-rations. Knowing that airplanes had weight limits, founder William Maxson invented a convection oven called the "Maxson Whirlwind Oven" that weighed 35 pounds made of aluminum and steel and could cook six frozen meals at once in half the time of a conventional oven.

At the time of the Popular Mechanics article, Maxson was making plans to produce "single food items for the busy housewife" like french fries, corn, carrots, Swiss steak and turkey. Maxson in , Strato-Plates never made it to the retail market.

Three years later, Jack Fisher released FrigiDinner, the first aluminum tray for frozen meals. It was the design the Swanson TV dinner tray — which was shaped like a television — would borrow from a decade later.

By , the same year Swanson trademarked the TV dinner concept, the brothers sold over two and a half-million frozen dinners. The most popular story — until recently — was that Swanson exec Gerry Thomas came up with the idea during a turkey surplus in The company needed a way to sell , pounds of extra bird. The most popular story was that a Swanson exec came up with the idea during a turkey surplus in Thomas, then 30, was on a business trip to Pittsburgh flying Pan American Airlines, when it hit him.

His heated meal was served in a metal tray. This was how Swanson would package the extra turkeys: frozen and in trays like the one on the plane. The first few thousand TV dinners were sold in Omaha near Swanson headquarters in After the meal went national, they sold ten million dinners in the first year.

In the AP interview, Thomas claimed credit not for the TV dinner itself — the airlines did that first — but for the method of how it was served. Marketing the product as an easy-to-eat meal in front of the television set, which was then skyrocketing in popularity, and using your lap as a table is what set Swanson apart from the previous frozen meals.

For his years of work in the industry and, of course, the TV dinner, Thomas was inducted into the Frozen Food Hall of Fame more on that later. One of his trays made an appearance in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and his hand prints are cemented into the ground outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre. But in , controversy over the real inventor surfaced from a Los Angeles Times article that questioned Thomas's story.

Heirs to the Swanson fortune told the newspaper that Thomas made the whole thing up, that he had little or nothing to do with the design of the dinner tray. Carol Swanson Price said her father, Clarke Swanson, and uncle, Gilbert Swanson, who ran the company in the early s, pitched the idea. Nearly 60 years later, the true inventor remains unknown. One thing we do know: Thomas stuck with his story until he died from cancer in He was The first frozen bagel was born in New Haven, Connecticut, a product that would introduce a convenience for shoppers that would change the American breakfast table for good.

In , Harry Lender and his sons Murray and Marvin began selling traditional Jewish breads and rolls and what would eventually make them famous: bagels. With the efficiency of the Thompson machine it could form bagels an hour , Lender's outgrew the state of Connecticut in bagel production.

Even after they began packaging them in plastic bags in the mid-fifties, the bagels would go stale after a few days. To extend the shelf life of the bagels they were producing in such large quantities, they flash-froze the product before shipping.

This, of course, compromised some of the made-from-scratch goodness of the original Lender's bagel, but over time, the company developed recipes for sweeter, softer bagels post freeze.