Birds Eye Foods

Birds Eye Foods

Birds Eye Foods, a company that has been around since the beginning of the 20th century, and with the use of vertical integration they were able to develop and take over the British frozen food industry. Yet, as the years pasted and the frozen food industry became more developed, Birds Eye faced the increasing competition, the loss of their shares to other companies; put the company at a disadvantage. From the strength and advantages of the 1950s and 1960s vertical integration, the company had faced a down hill spiral. Now Birds Eye must analyze and make a decision on how to go about strengthening their competitive advantage in the ever-changing frozen food market.

Synopsis

Birds Eye started off strong in the 1950s and 1960s, by vertically integrating an infrastructure when the frozen food industry was still in its beginnings with the production and raw material suppliers, distributors, and the early developments of retail stores, and the product innovation. Birds Eye was the pioneer in frozen goods. “Quick-Freezing arrests the process of decay in perishable goods and enables fresh foods to be distributed to consumer, wherever located and at any season,” allowed Birds Eye to have good quality foods- such as entering the chicken, fish, and vegetables industries (Grant, 2008, p. 233-234). Since the 1940s and 1950s, during the post-war years, left the retail distribution fragmented, it left a road that had eliminated food competition among food retailers. One way that Birds Eye was able to surpass was to work with Prestcold and Frigidaire to “start the production of “open top” display cabinets suitable for frozen food storage and display” (Grant, 2008, p. 236-237).

In the beginning, Birds Eye owned the entire food chain and made it difficult for any competition to enter because of its higher capital costs. By the 1950s, Birds eye had been able to establish an integrated system of production and distribution, and this made the company more...