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Barrister Bullets

Barrister Bullets

BETTER By: Melissa B. Carrasco

Egerton, McAfee, Armistead & Davis, P.C.

FREEZING BUT NOT FROZEN

Most people remember 1914 as the year the First World War began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the AustroHungarian empire, and the many declarations of war that followed shortly thereafter.1 However, while all of this upheaval was occurring in Europe, across the Atlantic, a young woman’s world was also turning upside down.

Marjorie was only twenty-seven years old when her father took his own life.2 He thought he had appendicitis, and traveled from Santa Barbara, California to Rochester, Minnesota to be treated by the famous Mayo brothers.3 When the pain did not subside, he put a shotgun to his head.4 That would be a heavy weight for a young adult, but it was about to get heavier. Marjorie was an only child, and her father was C.W. Post—founder of the Postum Cereal Company, inventor of Postum and Grape Nuts (so named because it smelled like grapes and crunched like nuts), and the man whose cereal empire was being challenged by young upstart William Kellogg.5

One month after Mr. Post died, Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, and now the weight of running a large cereal business while the world was at war fell squarely on the shoulders of young Marjorie. She was immediately the boss of over 2,500 employees and responsible for overseeing production factories covering 20 acres in Battle Creek, Michigan.6 Keep in mind that, at the time, women comprised less than seventeen percent (17%) of the workforce, and most of those were employed in factories and manufacturing—supporting the early days of the war effort—not running multi-million-dollar businesses.7

But that is precisely what Marjorie Merriweather Post did. Fortunately, she was not unprepared. From an early age, her father had made it a habit to take her on business trips, let her sit in on business meetings, and have her work in the factories.8 So, when her father passed away, she started commuting from her home in New York to Battle Creek, Michigan.9 Eventually, she started expanding the business, buying the companies that produced many of the items you have in your pantries today: Calumet Baking Power, Swan’s Down Cake Flour, Minute Tapioca, Jell-O, and Baker’s Chocolate.10 In 1922, she took the company public.11

About the same time that Marjorie was beginning her career running a multi-million-dollar business, a young man named Clarence was working in Labrador as a fur trader.12 During his five-year stint in the Arctic, Clarence noticed that the Inuit often froze foods during the winter because it was so difficult to obtain fresh food when the ice and snow came. He thought it was a great idea, and when he returned to the United States, he started working on a process to quickly freeze fresh fish.13

This was easier said than done. In the Arctic, the combination of ice, wind, and incredibly low temperatures caused meat and vegetables to freeze almost instantaneously. This flash-freezing preserved their flavor and texture.14 But, getting fresh food to a sub-zero temperature really fast was more than a little difficult below the Arctic Circle in 1917.

It also made no sense. In 1917 and the early 1920’s a refrigerator was a true icebox—an insulated box with a block of ice in it.15 Granted, you could buy one for less than $10.00 ($224.55 today), but it did not exactly keep things very cold let alone frozen.16 In 1927, General Electric introduced the first electric refrigerator, but at $525.00 ($7,725.92 in 2021 dollars), it wasn’t exactly affordable for most people.17 By 1930, only 8% of Americans even had an electric refrigerator, and household freezers did not go into mass production until the 1940s, after World War II.18

Clarence did not know that it would be over twenty years before freezers were as a common household appliance. Instead, in 1922, he founded a company freezing and selling frozen fish fillets.19 Two years later, he invented a process to flash freeze food by putting the food between two refrigerated surfaces while under pressure.20 That was also the year that he filed for bankruptcy—mainly because he had no way to ship his flash-frozen fish very far, and even if he did, consumers did not have freezers where they could store the fish.21 Undeterred, he kept inventing, and in 1927, he started flash freezing other food: vegetables, chicken, meat, and fruit.22

Around that same time, Marjorie and her husband, E.F. Hutton, were on a trip, and Marjorie got a taste of what she thought was a very fresh, very delicious roast goose.23 It wasn’t fresh. It was one of Clarence’s frozen products. Marjorie was hooked. She visited Clarence’s plant, and then she told her husband, who was also her business partner and Chairman of the Postum Board, that they needed to acquire Clarence’s company for $2 million.24 His answer was a resounding, “No.” In 1927, there were no freezers in homes or even in grocery stores. There was no such thing as freezer trucks. Buying a frozen food company was a terrible business idea.25

Two years later, at Marjorie’s insistence, Postum purchased Clarence Birdseye’s frozen food company and his patented process for flash freezing for $20 million.26 Marjorie changed the name of the company to General Foods Corporation, and General Foods made Birdseye frozen foods and many other brands Kool-Aid, Oscar Mayer, Tang, Entenmann’s Bakery, etc.) household names.27 It was one of the few companies that did not lose money in the Great Depression, and in 1958, it reached over a billion dollars in revenues.28 Marjorie served on the General Foods Board for 22 years and was its principal stockholder until 1965.29

What possessed Clarence Birdseye to start a company selling frozen food 20 years before the average person even knew what a freezer was? What possessed Marjorie Merriweather Post to purchase that company before there were freezers in homes, grocery stores, or even a way to keep food frozen in transportation? That is what happens when someone is willing to look for something better rather than being frozen in the past.

1 History.com, First World War Erupts, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ first-world-war-erupts#:~:text=On%20June%2028%2C%201914%2C%20 in,Gavrilo%20Princip%20in%20Sarajevo%2C%20Bosnia, last visited Jan. 9, 2022. 2 Erna P. Eaton, Marjorie Merriweather Post & a Life of Difficult Privilege, The Buffalo News (Mar. 19, 1995), available at https://buffalonews.com/news/marjoriemerriweather-post-and-a-life-of-difficult-privilege/article_15ad8e47-3528-5ba6b0d7-a12a56e8d84f.html. 3 Gary Hoover, Forgotten Giant: General Foods, American Business History Center (Oct. 23, 2020), https://americanbusinesshistory.org/forgotten-giant-generalfoods/#:~:text=At%20the%20age%20of%20twenty,wealthiest%20women%20 in%20the%20world.&text=In%201920%2C%20Marjorie%20married%20 her,stockbroker%20and%20yachtsman%20EF%20Hutton, last visited Jan. 9, 2022. 4 Dr. Gabe Mirkin, C.W. Post, Entrepreneur & Huckster (Dec. 9, 2019), https://www. drmirkin.com/histories-and-mysteries/c-w-post-entrepreneur.html, last visited Jan. 9, 2022. 5 Id.; see also Encyclopedia Britannica, C.W. Post, https://www.britannica.com/ biography/C-W-Post, last visited Jan. 9, 2022; Hoover, supra n. 3. 6 History of Kraft General Foods, Inc., https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/ history2/12/Kraft-General-Foods-Inc.html, last visited Jan. 9, 2022. 7 See Social Security Administration, Employment of Women in War Production (Bulletin 1942), available at https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v5n7/v5n7p4. pdfl see also Hoover, supra n. 3 (estimating that the Postum Cereal Company was averaging annual revenues of $20,000,000.00 when Mr. Post passed away). 8 Kenneth Lisenbee, Marjorie Merriweather Post: a Biography, available at http:// www.paulbowles.org/marjoriemerriweatherpost.html. 9 Id. 10 Hoover, supra n. 3. 11 Lisenbee, supra n. 8.

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