English 17th-century writer and philosopher Francis Bacon tried to freeze snow by stuffing it into a chicken, only to be chilled and soon fell ill. Even before Bacon's unfortunate experiment, it was known that extreme cold could stop eating meat from "going bad". This has led wealthy landowners to set up ice cellars in their estates where food can be preserved.
None of these early attempts to freeze food caught the point. It is not so much the degree of freezing as the speed of freezing that is the key to freezing the meat. Probably the first person to realize this was the American inventor Clarence Bozeyi.
It wasn't until the 1950 s and 1960 s, when home refrigerators became more popular, that frozen foods began to be sold in large quantities. Soon afterwards, the famous red, white and blue packaging of Bozeyi existed in shops in many parts of the world and became a familiar sight.
In the years after the First World War, Bozeyi conducted a census of wild plants while traveling on the Labrador Peninsula in Canada. He noticed that the weather was so cold that after he caught a fish, the fish froze hard. He wondered if that was the key to food preservation.
Unlike Bacon, Birzai lived in the age of the freezer. When he returned home in 1923, he experimented with a freezer in his kitchen. Next, Bozeyi tried to freeze different types of edible meat in a larger refrigeration plant. Bozeyi eventually discovered that the fastest way to freeze food was to press the meat tightly between two frozen metal plates. By the 1930 s, he was ready to start selling frozen foods from his Springfield, Massachusetts, plant.
Frozen food quickly became a big business for Bozeyer, with his company freezing 500 tons of fruit and vegetables a year even before he invented the efficient double-plate freezing process.