The American Association of Meat Processors (AAMP) recently celebrated 80 years of service to the meat industry during the 80th American Convention of Meat Processors and Suppliers’ Exhibition, July 25-27, in Mobile, Ala.
In 1912, Clarence Birdseye started a five-year journey around the Labrador waters in which he traveled by dog sled collecting furs for sale. During this period, Birdseye noted that duck and caribou frozen in the extreme cold of midwinter were better than those frozen in the spring or fall. He noticed how easily food was preserved in the arctic climate. He watched the Eskimos’ simple quick-freeze methods, a process by which items are frozen at such a speed that only small ice crystals are able to form, and noted that quickly frozen fish retained flavor and texture better than fish frozen slowly.
Birdseye entered the wholesale fish business in 1922 and experimented with the process of quick freezing food that he had learned while in Labrador. In 1923, with an investment of $7 for an electric fan, buckets of brine, and cakes of ice, Birdseye invented and later perfected a system of packing fresh food into waxed cardboard boxes and flash-freezing them under high pressure. In 1926, he had developed a quick-freeze double-belt machine weighing 20 tons. It was later transformed into a more transportable multiple-plate freezer, which was to become widely used in the frozen food industry.