1917 - Food And Drink

Food And Drink

Clarence Birdseye returns to his native New York to pursue the commercial exploitation of his food-freezing discoveries (see 1914). He has spent 3 years in Labrador, where obtaining fresh food for his young family has been an urgent problem. Birdseye has learned, after much experimentation, how to freeze cabbages in barrels of seawater, and he has found that frozen foods remain fresh when kept refrigerated at low temperatures (see 1923).

The first national advertising for Del Monte brand canned fruits and vegetables appears April 21 in the Saturday Evening Post (see California Packing Corp., 1916). Calpak acquires the Hawaiian Preserving Corp., whose properties include pineapple fields and a cannery on Oahu; in the next decade it will acquire canneries in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Florida, start growing and packing pineapples in the Philippines, and enter the canned sardine and tuna industries.

A&P founder George Huntington Hartford dies at Spring Lake, N.J., August 29 at age 83.