Frozen food and fishing
Frozen food was invented by watching people fish in the cold
Clarence Birdseye did not discover freezing in a lab. He saw it on a frozen lake in Labrador, and then asked the one question nobody else had.
Before the 1920s, frozen food was a bad joke. Meat and fish were frozen slowly in large cold rooms. Big ice crystals formed inside the flesh and tore it apart. When it thawed, it was mush. Nobody wanted it.
Then a young American named Clarence Birdseye went to Labrador, in the far north east of Canada, to work in the fur trade.
He went ice fishing with the local Inuit. He saw something that everyone there knew and nobody outside had thought about. When a fish was pulled out of the water into air that was far below freezing, it froze almost at once. Solid in moments. And months later, when it was thawed and cooked, it tasted fresh.
Birdseye asked why. The answer, he worked out, was speed. Freeze slowly and you get large ice crystals that damage the food. Freeze very fast and the crystals stay tiny. The structure survives.
Everyone in Labrador had been eating well-frozen fish for generations. The knowledge was common. It took an outsider who was paying attention to see it as a business.
He went home and spent years building machines that could freeze food between very cold metal plates, fast. He sold the company and the process in 1929 to the group that became General Foods. The Birds Eye brand is still on supermarket shelves today.
The lesson I take from this has nothing to do with food.
The best ideas I have seen in business came from watching, not from thinking. Someone stood in a shop, a warehouse, a clinic, and noticed a thing the people there did every day on autopilot. Then they asked why.
I did a version of this early in my career in supply chain. I spent a day at a loading dock instead of reading the reports about it. The reports said one thing. The dock said another. The dock was right.
When a client asks me where to find their next product or campaign, I give the same answer. Go and stand where your customer stands. Watch what they do with their hands. Ask the question that everyone there has stopped asking.
Birdseye did not invent freezing. He noticed it. There is a difference, and the difference is a company.
