Birds Eye

United States

In the early 1900s, during his travels through Northern Canada, Clarence Birdseye of Montclair, New Jersey, saw the Inuit use ice, wind, and temperature to instantly freeze freshly-caught fish. His curiosity piqued, and Clarence wondered if this method, called flash freezing, could also be applied to other foods. This 1920s hunting trip to Canada inspired Birdseye's food preserving method.

Birdseye conducted experiments and received patents for the development of greatly improved methods to freeze fish for commercial production. In 1922, he formed "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 the "General Seafood Corporation", to promote this method. In 1929, Birdseye sold his company and patents for $22 million to Goldman Sachs and the Postum Cereal Company, which eventually established a new business, General Foods, and which founded the "Birds Eye Frozen Food Company".

After being acquired by the Philip Morris Companies, General Foods then merged into Kraft Foods Inc. in 1990. 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. In March 2010, Pinnacle announced it would be closing the Rochester headquarters and moving operations to New Jersey. Pinnacle Foods was then acquired by Conagra Brands in June 2018, with Birds Eye becoming part of its brand portfolio.

Europe

In June 1938, Frosted Foods was formed to exploit the Birds Eye Frozen Foods brand in the UK.

In 1943, Unilever acquired T. J. Lipton, a majority stake in Frosted Foods (owner of the Birds Eye brand in the UK) and Batchelors Peas, one of the largest vegetables canners in the United Kingdom.

Birds Eye also operated a factory in Grimsby, mass producing a range of fish and vegetable based frozen foods, moving to Unilever's Ladysmith Road site for the mass production of fish fingers in 1955, this factory closed 2005, with the loss of 650 jobs. The fish finger became the company's staple product, being developed in 1955 at its factory in Great Yarmouth, by H A J Scott, and test marketed in the south of England before mass production began. Production of fish fingers moved to the manufacturing site in Lowestoft in 1986. One of the company's main UK pea processing sites is in Gipsyville, Hull; the company formerly operated a large pea processing factory in the same area; it opened in 1967 and closed in 2007.

On August 28, 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.

Oceania

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".

Birds Eye has acquired many well-established brands, some of which are distributed regionally and not nationally. The following brands are owned and distributed by Birds Eye:

2013 European meat adulteration scandal

In 2013, DNA tests revealed that horsemeat was present in Birds Eye chili con carne that was sold in Belgium and was produced and supplied by a Belgian group named Frigilunch. As a result, Birds Eye withdrew all other products produced by the same supplier in the UK and Ireland.