Birds Eye

In the early 1900s, Clarence Frank Birdseye II of Montclair, New Jersey, conducted experiments and received patents for the development of greatly improved methods to freeze fish for commercial production. In 1922, he formed a company, Birdseye Seafood, Inc., to freeze fish fillets with chilled air at −45 °F (−43 °C). In 1924, he developed an entirely new process for commercially viable quick-freezing: packing fish in cartons, then freezing the contents between two refrigerated surfaces under pressure. Birdseye created a new company, General Seafood Corporation, to promote this method. In 1929, Birdseye sold his company and patents for $22 million to Goldman Sachs and the Postum Company, which eventually became General Foods Corporation, and which founded the Birds Eye Frozen Food Company. Birdseye continued to work with the company, further developing frozen food technology.

As part of General Foods, Birds Eye merged with Kraft Foods and Philip Morris USA to form the Altria Group. Birds Eye was sold to Dean Foods in 1993 and was independently owned by Birds Eye Foods of Rochester, New York until it was purchased by Pinnacle Foods in 2009.[2]

In March 2010, Pinnacle announced it would be closing the Rochester headquarters and moving operations to New Jersey.[3]

The Birds Eye brand is used extensively throughout the UK and Ireland. In other parts of Europe the Iglo brand is used.[4]

The company's staple product, the fish finger, was developed in 1955 at its factory in Great Yarmouth, by H A J Scott.[4] One of the company's main UK pea processing sites is in Gipsyville, Hull;[5] the company formerly operated a large pea processing factory in the same area, opened 1967, closed 2007.[6] Birds Eye also operated a factory in Grimsby, founded 1929, closed 2005, with the loss of 650 jobs.[7]

Unilever announced in August 2006 that the UK subsidiary brand was sold to UK-based private equity group Permira.[8]

The Birds Eye brand in Australia and New Zealand is owned by Simplot Australia Pty Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the J.R. Simplot Company. Simplot purchased Birds Eye and many of Australia's leading food brands from Pacific Dunlop's Pacific Brands in the mid-1990s. In 2015, Birds Eye was awarded by Reader's Digest as ‘"Australia’s Most Trusted Frozen Food Brand".[9] Birds Eye products are produced at the company's processing facilities in Devonport, Ulverstone, Tasmania, and Bathurst, New South Wales, as well as from imported ingredients. Some seafood items are processed overseas and the completed product imported.

On 9 February 2006, Unilever announced it was looking to sell the UK Birds Eye brand, as well as the European version – Iglo (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands and Portugal). These brands were worth £836M in sales, with profits of £115M a year, and employed 3,500 staff across Europe with 1,800 located in the UK.

On 28 August 2006, it was confirmed that Unilever had agreed to the sale of the UK brand, held since the late 1930s, to private equity house Permira for £1.2bn.[8]

In the United Kingdom, Captain Birdseye was an advertising mascot of the brand, from the 1960s to late 1990s. Appearing in numerous television and billboard commercials since 1967, he was played by the actor John Hewer between then and 1998 e.g. in 1986 advert for Birdsye Fish Fingers.[12] After the retirement of the original actor, the brand was relaunched with a younger man with designer stubble (played by Thomas Pescod), but was less popular, and the character was dropped from Birdeye's advertising. A 2014 redesign of the brand's packaging[13] includes artwork resembling the original Captain Bird's Eye.[4]

Child actress Patsy Kensit appeared in an early 1970s advert for frozen peas. This featured a jingle including the slogan "Sweet as the moment when the pod went 'pop'" but as years went on they reverted to a jingle "Come Home To Birds Eye Country" – a series of adverts from the late 1960s to in or around the late 1980s to early 1990s.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, June Whitfield appeared in a series of television advertisements for Birds Eye products, featuring the concluding voice-over line: "... it can make a dishonest woman of you!".[14] The series was the brainchild of advertising art director Vernon Howe and was mentioned in several of his obituaries.[15][16]

Advertising campaigns of the 1980s included one for Potato waffles that had a jingle including the words Waffley versatile. A popular advertisement for Birds Eye Steakhouse Grills featured a scene of hungry building site workers heading home in a minibus and singing about what they were hoping their partners would serve with their steak burgers. The song to the tune of Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) included the tag line "we hope it's chips".[17]