Reimagining Industry Growth

7Frozen Foods

People have been freezing food as a means of preservation and storage for a very long time. The modern frozen food industry, however, didn't officially begin until biologist, inventor, and entrepreneur Clarence Birdseye determined to make it so. In 1922, he “set out to ‘create an industry, to find a commercially viable way of producing large quantities of fast frozen fish.’”¹

In 1927, Birdseye invented a multiplate freezing machine to flash-freeze (or “quick-freeze,”² as he called it) haddock, a process he had witnessed among the Inuits while fur trading in Labrador more than a decade earlier. He pronounced it “a marvelous new process which seals in every bit of just-from-the-ocean flavor,”³ and a brand-new industry was born.

By 1929, the great barrier to the success of Birdseye's nascent frozen food industry—public acceptance—was breached when General Foods arrived on the scene.⁴ Today, frozen food is one of the fastest-growing categories in the food industry.

In 2019, the global frozen food market was valued at $291.8 billion.⁵ The industry ecosystem is divided into two main components, foodservice and retail. See Figure 7.1.

Figure 7.1 The Frozen Food Industry Ecosystem

Source: Illustration artwork prepared by Erin Wagner, Edge Research.

Foodservice makes up the bulk of the frozen food industry; it includes everything from agriculture (the growing and production ...