Birds of Different Feathers
By John Clancy

John Clancy looks into the histories of two well-known food brands Bird's of custard fame and the Birds Eye associated with frozen fish, peas and other products.

How many people can say they love their wife so much they're prepared to re-invent foods to ease her health problems? Alfred Bird, the inventor of Bird's custard and baking powder, was just such a man. His wife Elizabeth suffered badly from digestive disorders. Eggs gave her heartburn and anything containing yeast, like bread, brought on dyspepsia. Fortunately for her, Alfred was an experimental chemist, the kind of man who saw opportunity where others saw only problems. To begin with he sought to solve the bread problem. He knew he had to perfect a yeast substitute, and after six years of experimenting developed a baking powder called Bird's Fermenting Powder. It produced bread, cakes and buns of a much lighter texture than those that had used live yeast. Mrs. Bird tried the bread and found it had no aftereffects whatsoever. Alfred's next task was to eliminate eggs from custard. Traditionally, custard consists of beaten eggs, milk and sugar, which is either baked or boiled in a saucepan. He based his new recipe on cornflour, and like his baking powder it produced a dish every bit as palatable as the original. It was easier to make, cheaper than the conventional and, most importantly, didn't give Mrs. Bird heartburn.

Alfred Bird manufactured and sold both products from his chemist's shop beneath the old Market Hall in Bell Street, Birmingham. At first the public were unsure about the new baking powder and sales were slow. To publicise his new products Alfred had calendars printed, which he gave away, making him one of the first businessmen to exploit the selling power of calendars. In 1855 Alfred won an order from the War Office to supply baking powder for the British forces serving in the Crimean War. It revolutionised the troops' diet because, until then, it had not been possible to store live yeast in warfare conditions. Troops had to live on hard-tack biscuits. Bird's baking powder gave them the chance to have fresh bread. The next product to be introduced to the Bird's range was blancmange powder in 1870. It was devised by Alfred's son, Alfred junior, who had joined the family firm. The new blancmange came in 14 different flavours, and was followed in 1895 by Bird's Jelly Crystals, the forerunner of tablet jellies.

By the mid-1940s the family firm of Alfred Bird & Sons Ltd. had expanded to manufacture Grape Nut cereal and Maxwell House coffee in Britain for the General Foods Corporation of America, of which they became a part in 1947. The firm's custard powder still represents a large part of its turnover. On average, each of us consumes almost half a gallon per year.
Another of Bird's best-selling products is Maxwell House coffee, which takes its name from a hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, whose guests unknowingly were guinea pigs for new blends of coffee. The blend was the result of years of experimenting by Joel Cheek, a travelling salesman from Kentucky. At first his experiments on blend proportions, selection of beans and roasting times were conducted in his spare time, but in 1882 he decided to set up on a full-time basis to search for the perfect blend of coffee. Having found what he thought was the ideal blend, he took it to the Maxwell House Hotel, where the management agreed to give it a trial. Within weeks the hotel's guests, who included Presidents, Generals, diplomats and European nobility were singing the praises of this new coffee. The hotel after which the coffee was named burned down in 1961, but its name lives on in a brand of coffee that is still popular to this day, with an average British consumption of six million cups per day.

Not to be confused with Alfred Bird's company is that of Birds Eye. Its products were first marketed by Clarence Birdseye in 1924. The corruption of the name to Birds Eye came in 1929 after Clarence sold his company, the General Seafoods Corporation, to the Postum Company for a staggering $22 million (then worth more than £5 million). What the Postum Company actually bought was Clarence's secret to the successful freezing of food. It was something he'd discovered in 1912 while working in the frozen wastes of Labrador, Canada. He'd noticed that frozen fish and caribou meat still tasted fresh and was crisp when thawed out, even after months of being frozen. As a scientist, he knew that in the normal freezing process large ice crystals break down the texture of the cell walls, and when thawed out the food becomes a soggy, tasteless mass. Clarence pondered over the problem for months. He finally realised that the secret to successful freezing lay in the speed at which the food was frozen. In the sub-zero temperatures of Labrador, food left exposed to the elements froze solid within minutes.

He concluded that during this quick-freezing process tiny ice crystals rather than large ones formed, and these were small enough to leave the cell structure intact. In this way the food's taste and texture remained perfect. Back home in his laboratory, using brine, ice and an electric fan, Clarence tried for eight years to replicate what nature was doing. In 1924 he started to produce frozen fish on a commercial basis. It wasn't until 1930 that the Postum Company managed to expand their lines to include the first frozen peas, spinach, raspberries and other fruit. In Britain the Unilever Group acquired patents for the quickfreezing of food by Birds Eye in 1938, and today its products are still among the brand leaders. Where would we be today without frozen and instant foods? We take them very much for granted without realising what lies behind them.

Article reprinted with the permission of ‘Best of British’ magazine. The image shows a Bird’s custard powder advertisement of 1896, highlighting the fact that eggs were no longer needed to make an acceptable custard.