Article for frost food

Birdseye's double belt freezer (US Patent #1,773,079)

American biologist Clarence Birdseye gets the idea for frost beans in a science mission.

He became interested in food preservation by freezing while working as a field naturalist for the United States government in Labrador , Canada , between 1912-1915. He was working to pay for his education as a biology major at Amherst College .

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 knew immediately that the frozen seafood sold in New York was of lower quality than the frozen fish of Labrador .

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. We now know that fast freezing produces smaller ice crystals, which cause less damage to the tissue structure.

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