Aviva Trivia

Today, we can barely live without packaged frozen food, but this ubiquitous food staple, as we know it, is only seventy-five years old.  See how many of these frozen food facts you know.

1. Clarence Birdseye is generally acknowledged as the father of frozen food.  His “Birdseye” line first appeared in March of 1930.  The company stills sells frozen fruits and vegetables.

2. Mr. Birdseye learned about preserving food by freezing it from Canada’s Inuit people.

3. Frozen food was rather slow to catch on.  Consumers didn’t think to look in the ice cream cooler for dinner.

4. The optimistic, postwar-World War II years of the 1950s, saw an explosion in frozen food consumption as well as the varieties offered, but still only 64 percent of grocery stores had a frozen food department.

5. Swanson introduced the first TV dinner in the mid-1950s and a whole industry was born.

6. March is National Frozen Food Month in the United States.

7. The Chinese preserved food with ice cellars, an early method of freezing, as early as 1000 B.C.

8. Restrictions on tin during World War II favored the fledgling frozen food industry, which used paper and cardboard, rather than tin cans, to package their products.