Background
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.
entrepreneur inventor naturalist
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.
He studied in the public schools, and then attended Amherst College from 1908 to 1910.
Birdseye went to Labrador in 1912 on a fur-trading expedition with the missionary-physician Sir Wilfrid Grenfell, remaining until 1916. He returned in the same year and became interested in frozen foods. Birdseye experimented with the freezing of fish and rabbits over a period of eight years, and learned that many foods, when quickly frozen, could be preserved indefinitely.
In 1924 he participated in the formation of the General Foods Company, Gloucester, Massachusetts, which began quick-freezing various food products on a commercial scale and in 1929 was sold to the Postum Company for $22,000,000, the name soon being changed to General Foods Corporation. In the late 1930, he perfected and patented a new food dehydrating process. In his frozen food cases he included 26 different types of fish, meat, fruit, and vegetables. Consumers liked the new products and today this is considered the birth of retail frozen foods.
In 1953 he began a series of successful experiments in Peru to develop and perfect a continuous flow process for converting crushed sugarcane into paper pulp.
Birdseye died on October 7, 1956, of a heart attack at the Gramercy Park Hotel. He was 69 years old. Birdseye was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea off Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Quotations:
"I am best described as just a guy with a very large bump of curiosity and a gambling instinct."
"Go around asking a lot of dam fool questions and taking chances. Only through curiosity can we discover opportunities, and only by gambling can we take advantage of them."