Upper Valley Anonymous

Forrest “Tink” Aikens, son of Seth Aikens and grandson of Charles Aikens, worked in the grocery business from the 1940's to at least 1960. During that time, the grocery industry went through serious changes. In many ways the grocery stores of the '60's hardly resembled the grocery stores of the '30's. In my last post I talked about how milk marketing changed over time. That wasn't the only change in the grocery business.

When I think about milk, the next thing I think about is orange juice, for whatever reason. Up until World War II, houswives served their families fresh squeezed orange juice for breakfast, not to be fancy, but because that's all they had. I've always wondered why juice glasses are so small. I like juice and serve juice at my house in full 8 ounce glasses. I realized doing the research for this blog that it's because you couldn't get that much juice by squeezing oranges. Everyone got a little juice glass full and they were satisfied with that much. If you wanted a lot to drink, you drank milk or water.

This all changed after World War II. At the end of the war, food scientists and engineers developed a way to concentrate juice and freeze it, to ship overseas to the troops. Immediately after the war, it was shipped to war-torn Europe to feed mothers and children in countries that had no food due to the devastation of the war. Frozen juice concentrate was a new product companies were eager to market to consumers at large. Frozen display cases were already being used for meat, and frozen orange quickly caught on among housewives who were happy to give up the daily chore of squeezing orange juice.

From 1940-1970, orange production increased 450% as a result of the popularity of frozen orange juice. Canned juice had been available for several decades, but consumers didn't like the taste of juice in cans. In 1960, the Tropicana Company started freezing juice in its original form, without concentrating it, marketing as “fresh, never frozen or concentrated”. People bought it because they

thought it tasted better, but it was more expensive that frozen concentrate because it cost more to
store it in liquid form – it took up more space. For a long while, Tropicana had the market for fresh orange juice cornered, but now several other companies also market fresh orange juice. Growing up, my family always drank Tropicana, which is surprising since I lived on a farm and my mother didn't have much money. She was ahead of her time as far as healthy food was concerned, though, and she was probably willing to spend the extra to have something as natural as you could get, at that time. Much of the orange juice sold in little bottles, though, that you buy in convenience stores, is frozen and reconstituted.

 

These are the Tropicana bottles I remember. I lived on a dairy farm

and my father brought milk in from the bulk tank in these bottles.

At the same time frozen orange juice was being developed, Clarence Birdseye developed frozen vegetables. Clarence Birdseye was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1886. He went to Amherst College to learn to become a biologist but never finished school because he couldn't afford the tuition. He got a job as a government field naturalist and made money on the side through trading furs. On a fur trading expedition in Labrador, he saw the Eskimos preserve meat by flash-freezing it. He realized that if you flash-froze vegetables it would work just as well.

Birdseye invented a flash-freeze machine and in 1924 started a frozen-food company, the General Seafood Corporation, which focused mostly on frozen fish. In 1929 the Postum Company bought General Seafood and the combined company was renamed General Foods. General Foods retained Clarence Birdseye as the head of their frozen food department, and called their frozen food line Birds Eye. Frozen food didn't really catch on until after World War II, when self service freezer cases became more common in grocery stores. By the time Clarence Birdseye died in 1954, frozen food had become a multi-billion dollar industry.

Even the transaction to buy food changed after World War II. Before the war, a housewife went to the General Store, gave the grocer an order, and he would “put up” your order, in a combination of packaging that he supplied and containers the housewife brought from home. The paper bag was invented in the late 1800's, but the advent of self-service grocery stores brought something new – the shopping cart.

The first self-service grocery store was the Piggly Wiggly of Memphis, Tennessee. The first Piggly Wiggly opened in 1916, and became the first chain supermarket as Piggly Wiggly stores opened throughout the South. Sylvan Goldman owned several Piggly Wiggly stores in Oklahoma during the Depression. Sales were down due to hard economic times, and Goldman spent a fair amount of time trying to think of ways to get customers to spend more money in his stores. One day, he realized that consumers could only buy as much food as they could carry. He immediately ordered baskets for customers to fill and carry up to the checkout counter. Customers used the baskets right away and sales skyrocketed.

The next question was “How can I design a bigger basket that shoppers will fill with more groceries? Maybe a basket on wheels.” The problem was that larger baskets on wheels would take up too much expensive floor space. Looking at the folding chairs in his office, Goldman got the idea of double decker baskets mounted on a folding frame. Customers could take a basket from the stack, unfold it, wheel it around the store, fill it with groceries, take it to the checkout counter and return it to the stack, wheel it out to their vehicle, and return it to the stack when they were done shopping. He designed these baskets, contacted a manufacturer, and had some made and delivered to his store. He called them grocery carts.

Great idea! Unfortunately, shoppers didn't take to the grocery carts as quickly as they did to the small baskets. Women thought they were too much like baby carriages, and men, who hadn't objected to the small baskets, thought a basket on wheels made them out to be weaklings who couldn't carry their own groceries.

Goldman was convinced that the grocery cart would increase sales. He hired good looking young women and tough athletic looking men to walk around the store and “shop”, put items into well-filled grocery carts and bring them through the checkout. Use of grocery carts increased with this clever

marketing technique and sales took another huge leap. Soon, grocery carts became common throughout the country.

Although I'm fascinated with the evolution of the grocery industry after World War II, probably because I've spent more time than I wish in grocery stores while I raised six children, I should probably leave this subject and pick it up another time. Just one more thing......

In 2014, the Upper Valley has a fairly local connection to the Piggly Wiggly. I have always associated the Piggly Wiggly with the South. Piggly Wiggly supermarkets still exist today and their national headquarters is in Keene, New Hampshire. Piggly Wiggly is a subsidiary of C & S Grocers of Keene. C & S was ranked by Forbes magazine as the 10^th largest privately held company in the country. Rick Cohen, president of C & S groceries, lives in Keene and is the 2^nd richest man in New England.