Your Neighborhood A&P

The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) was the largest grocery retailer in the USA for the first half of the 20th Century. The management had the resources to be able to lower consumer prices and at the same time keep their profits just above the break-even point. Most small retailers, many not able to stay afloat for more than a year anyway, hated chain stores because they were unable to compete with this strategy. Congressional lobbyists set out to destroy A&P with ridiculously high taxes in the mid-1930s then suggested splitting the dominating store into several companies in the 1940s. The attacks were against any large chain store, but being by far the largest of them all, A&P was especially hit hard with unproven accusations and a lack of understanding of how their business model worked, even into the 1950s. The eventual death of both controlling brothers left its successor unequipped to modernize A&P's conservative management. During the 1960s few were shopping at their outdated supermarkets with higher prices. A&P's constant battles were something to behold. 

An excellent consensus of what happened to A&P.

Read about A&P's famous Eight O'Clock Coffee.

Freezing Entrepreneur

Clarence Birdseye (1886-1956) is known for much more than frozen peas. He was an American inventor, entrepreneur, and naturalist, considered the founder of the modern frozen food industry. 

In 1922, Birdseye conducted fish-freezing experiments and eventually established his own company, Birdseye Seafoods Inc. His experiments found that rapid freezing, at lower temperatures, gives crystals less time to form and thus does less damage than being frozen slowly. His company went bankrupt in 1924 for lack of consumer interest. That same year, 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 General Seafood Corporation to promote this method. By 1929, Birdseye sold his company and patents for $22 million to Goldman Sachs and the Postum Company, which eventually became General Foods Corporation which founded the Birds Eye Frozen Food Company. The "Birds Eye" name remains a leading frozen-food brand. In 1949, Birdseye won the Institute of Food Technologists' Babcock-Hart Award.

Learn more about this inventor here.

Everything Within Easy Reach

 

The 1959 Acme Market Food-O-Mat (above) in Nottingham Plaza, Syracuse, New York, features the "carton flow" form of shelving that uses a gravity-feed rear-load design. Lansing Shield, President of Grand Union Company, formed a company called Food-O-Mat to sell the carton flow system by 1948. Gauer Metal Products manufactured the carton flow units for Food-O-Mat markets. The carton flow rack shelving system always keeps items within easy reach. The carton flow design has gone through countless changes over the years and has now evolved into full shelving units, more widely used in warehousing.

A modern sectional shelving unit