One of the earliest known attempts to invent the freezing process is attributed to SirFrancis Bacon, a well-known English philosopher. In March 1626, he bought a hen, dressed it, and stuffed it with snow. The cooling effect of salt and ice was first publicly discussed in 1662 by the chemist Robert Boyle, but this technology was certainly known in Spain, Italy and India in the sixteenth century.
In 1755 William Cullen first made ice without any natural form of cooling by vapourising water at low pressure. This was followed by Jacob Perkins in 1834 who made the first ice-making machine operating on ethyl ether. In the following 30 years refrigeration technology developed rapidly, spearheaded by the likes of Joule and Kelvin, and the first patents related to freezing of food were filed.
In 1861, Enoch Piper of Camden, Maine, patented a method to freeze whole fish using a mixture of salt and ice to obtain a medium with sub-freezing temperature. He spread the mixture over racks of fish to freeze the product and was able to hold the frozen fish in insulated storage rooms cooled with chilled brine.
In 1865 the first cold storage warehouse in New York was built which used brine for cooling. In 1868 a ship’s cold air machine was used on board the Anchor line’s Circassian and Strathlevan ships that transported meat from New York to Glasgow. This was rapidly followed in the 1880s by the transport of meat from Australia and New Zealand to London.
In 1925, Clarence Birdseye, an American inventor, quick froze fish on a refrigerated moving belt an started a new industry. He developed a simple freezing system by putting foods packaged in rectangular containers in contact with metal belts chilled from -40 to -45°C with calcium chloride solution. Later, he employed pressure to improve the contact between the food and the metal plates and used vaporizing ammonia to cool the plates. His process and its auxiliaries gave birth to the modern frozen food industry.
Large scale commercial food freezing began a few years later when a major processor bought Birdseye’s patent and began marketing frozen fruits and vegetables.
In 1929, the necessity of blanching to inactivate enzymes before freezing was concluded by several researchers to avoid deterioration and off-flavours caused by enzymatic degradation.
The first complete frozen meals, consisting of an entre´e with two vegetables on a paperboard tray treated with Bakelite resin, were devised by William Maxson in 1944 for in-flight feeding of troops going abroad and later for general sale to the public with a wider range of meals.
In 1953, frozen ready meals on aluminum foil trays were first marketed as ‘TV dinners’ by the Swanson Company in the United States: this was the start of the increasing popularity of frozen ready meals over the next 50 years until more recently being rivaled by the chilled ready meal.
History of frozen food
