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Chicago's Reese Finer Foods puts out garlic juice and barbecue smoke in roll-on bottles, horseradish whip and garlic whip in Aerosol cans. Libby, McNeill & Libby is experimenting with Aerosol cans of mayonnaise and cake frosting. Oscar Mayer has just put on sale a complete pizza mix in a tube; National Dairy this fall began selling liquid instant coffee in an Aerosol can. Seabrook Farms and others put out casserole dishes in plastic bags that can be tossed whole into a pot of water, cooked and served. Before long, Tropicana will introduce concentrated orange drink in an Aerosol can that automatically dispenses a teaspoon at a time for mixing.
How much does the new convenience cost the U.S. housewife? Couples and small families agree that the price is right, but large families often find prepared food portions too small, priced too high to buy in quantity. Gourmet foods are almost uniformly expensive. Yet a U.S. Department of Agriculture study showed that if a typical consumer bought $100 worth of regular foods, they would cost him only 61¢ less than if he had bought the serviced equivalent. The food industry points out that the extra costs of "conveniencing" foods can be considered the expense of maid service. Says Charlie Mortimer: "If you compute the relative costs of the two types of meals versus the time spent by the housewife, the housewife is getting the services of a maid for 45¢ an hour. My sons pay teen-age baby sitters more than that."
Answer from a Fish. The chief credit for triggering the great change in U.S. eating habits belongs to a man named Clarence Birdseye, a fur trader, biologist and Yankee tinkerer from Gloucester, Mass. On a trip to Labrador some 40 years ago, Birdseye began to wonder why fish and meat that he froze quickly in the —50° temperature tasted just as good and fresh when he cooked them six months later, while food frozen by the old, slow method lost much of its quality and flavor. Birdseye persisted until he found out why: quick freezing prevents formation of large cell-destroying ice crystals. He went back home to Gloucester, worked out a commercial quick-freeze process, set up the business that became the foundation of the frozen-foods industry. In 1929 he sold his 168 patents to the Postum Co.
Postum was founded in 1895 by a health-food fan named Charles William Post, who invented Postum and Grape Nuts, one of the first cold cereals, built a thriving business in Battle Creek, Mich, before he died in 1914. Later, under President Colby Chester and Chairman E. F. Hutton (who married Post's daughter Marjorie), the company diversified so fast by buying up other companies that the big shopping bag was renamed General Foods. As it continued to grow under Austin Igleheart, who had joined Postum in 1926 when it purchased his family-run company (Swans Down cake flour), and Clarence Francis, the emphasis in the food business moved more and more from manufacturing to marketing. Thus, when Francis moved up to chairman in 1954, the presidency went to Marketing Expert Mortimer.