How one not so “nutty” professor revolutionized the $46 billion poultry industry
And ignited a world-wide craving for his scientific-tested and tasted nuggets of fried chicken
During wars, and especially WWII soldiers had to make do with rations of prepackaged foods to keep themselves well fed. It’s not like they could dash out to the nearest grocery store to stock up on goods.
The foods they carried were known as reserve rations or as the soldiers liked to call them “C-Rats.” And they mostly consisted of canned corn beef or bacon, hardtack biscuits, some ground coffee, sugar, salt, and tobacco with rolling paper.
Not much in the way of variety, right?
That’s why researchers at the Quartermaster Subsistence Research and Development Laboratory in Chicago went to work to create food products that could be kept for long time periods and were more delicious and nutritious than prior reserve rations.
What the Lab came up with was a 12-ounce tinplate can of stew that a soldier opened with a turnkey. But as the War progressed, the Lab added more varieties of foods including meat and spaghetti in tomato sauce, chopped ham, eggs and potatoes, meat and noodles, pork and beans, ham and lima beans, and vegetables.
When three meals a day were consumed, “C-Rats” provided about 3,700 calories. They could be eaten cold but tasted so much better when cooked.
The meals the soldiers particularly liked were the meat dishes. So the U.S. military commandeered red meat for soldiers, which in turn created a beef shortage back home.
Suddenly chicken became many Americans’ primary source of protein. But that move also incentivized businesses to produce the birds more cheaply. In fact according to anthropologist and author Steve Striffler, of Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food, “World War II encouraged the spread, modernization and industrialization of chicken on a much larger scale.”
But then a not so funny thing happened. Since chickens were now being produced in larger quantities, the U.S. government did the same thing … it commandeered chicken to be used in reserve rations.
When the war finally ended, both red meats and chicken were now available to citizens back home. But turns out Americans preferred red meat over poultry, so the demand for chickens took a big decline.
That wasn’t the only problem the chickens suffered. When the soldiers returned home from the war, families were reunited and that meant the size of the family went from mom and kids to mom, dad, and kids.
In other words, the size of the families was growing. And back then chickens were sold as a whole bird, which just wasn’t big enough to feed these now reunited families.
So the poor little lonely chickens were lift with nothing more to do than laying eggs.
It would take a stroke of genius to reinvigorate the American appetite for chicken.
A Chicken Savant
Robert C. Baker was born Dec. 29, 1921, in Newark, N.Y. He earned a bachelor's degree from Cornell in 1943, majoring in pomology at the College of Agriculture.
What is pomology you ask?
Well Dear Reader it’s the science of growing fruit. That includes studying the growing conditions of fruits such as strawberries, blueberries, apples, oranges and also sometime nut trees like almonds and hazelnuts.
Now the reason why Robert chose pomology is because he intended to work on the family farm. You see he grew up on a small fruit farm a few miles from Lake Ontario and planned to help his family out.
The only other dream job Robert had in mind was to become a professor at Cornell. But that seemed like a bit of a stretch … to actually get a job working at the school you dreamed of attending for years.
So after graduating college, Robert worked for the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Saratoga County, N.Y., which provides surrounding neighborhoods with research and other educational resources on commercial agriculture techniques; nutrition and health information; and updates on natural resources.
Robert Baker was a true information seeker, so for him learning was an almost never ending process. He went on to receive a master's degree in marketing from Penn State in 1949 and a doctorate in food science from Purdue University.
With his education now completed, Robert took a chance and applied for a teaching position at Cornell University, where he was accepted. And the field he would pursue … poultry.
Yes, that’s right. Robert gave up pomology for “chicken-ology.”
Little Chick on A Stick
While at Cornell, Robert set up a lab, specifically to study different ways of using poultry to supplement a family’s dietary needs, developing ways to “fatten” the skinny birds up, as well how to package frozen birds so they fresher longer.
In fact one of the first things Robert did, along with Joseph Hotchkiss, then an assistant professor of food science and now chair of the department, was develop a modified atmosphere vacuum packaging system to improve the chicken-shipping process.
See prior to their invention, chicken was packed on ice and then shipped out to restaurants and grocers. Their new process made it much easier and less costly to send poultry out to wholesalers.
It’s said that the late chicken magnate Frank Perdue implemented Robert and Joseph’s ideas immediately, and those processes are still used to this day.
The other problem the poultry industry faced was not knowing how to sell chicken meat other than selling the entire bird. Robert C. Baker was determined to figure out different ways to serve chicken.
And thus he began experimenting with a variety of recipes with chicken as the main ingredient.
Through his experiments, Baker realized he could remove the chicken’s skin, cut it different pieces, and then dip it into a bread and egg batter. Once coated with the batter, Baker then deep fried the chicken.
To make his new chicken invention more sell-able, he repeated the same steps except this time he put a stick in the middle. He had just created the first chicken on a stick.
Baker sent his chicken sticks to local grocery stores, where they were an instant hit, with some selling up to 200 boxes per week.
But his chicken experimental recipes didn’t end there. He felt his process could be improved upon and refined, so next he tried chopping the chicken into little bite-sized pieces. And then coated those pieces into a mixture of vinegar, salt, grains, and milk powder so that it would not fall apart. Next, he dipped it into the egg batter and deep fried the piece.
Robert C. Baker had just created a delicious tasting chicken nugget. Just as he did with his chicken sticks, in 1950 he sent the nuggets to restaurants and grocery stores. But they didn’t sell quite as well as the sticks.
But that didn’t matter to Mr. Baker. Now that he had discovered that chicken could be served in more ways than just the whole bird, in 1963 he published his entire process for creating his sticks and nuggets in Agricultural Economics Research, the premier paper of the Food and Agriculture Research and the World Farmers Organization.
He also sent copies to hundreds of poultry companies and food scientists throughout the U.S. He wanted everyone to have his recipes so they too could see there are many ways to serve chicken. But he also hoped his work would inspire others to continue creating new ways to serve chicken.
The Queen’s Nugget
Now I can’t tell you if Ray Kroc, the owner of McDonald’s read Mr. Baker’s paper on how to make chicken nuggets, but I can tell you he was eager to develop and sell an alternative product that wasn’t made of red meat.
See, at the time, the U.S. government had been suggesting that too much red meat was not good for long term health. And Mr. Kroc wanted to add menu items that went along with the government’s “don’t eat red meat” dietary guidelines.
What Mr. Kroc wanted to create was a chicken product that would offer convenience, a boneless piece of chicken that could sell almost like French fries.
So he hired renown chef Rene Arend, who had once cooked for Queen Elizabeth to create a chicken item for the restaurants. Rene went right to work and wound up creating a fried chicken breast served in a sauce.
The item was well received in the main corporate office but the problem with the fried chicken breast was it could not be reproduced on the massive scale needed by McDonald’s franchises.
Then Mr. Arend cooked up a chicken pot pie, but the corporate office quickly rejected it for the same reasons as it did for his chicken breast.
Finally he cut chicken into small pieces and coated them with a bread-like batter. Then he fried the pieces. This is exactly what Ray Kroc was looking for to add to his menu.
But to make it work on a large scale, Ray hired Keystone Foods, a maker of frozen hamburgers, to automate the chicken-chopping process. He also brought on Gorton’s, best known for their frozen fish sticks, to create a batter for the fried chicken that could be reproduced in large masses.
In 1981, McDonald’s officially introduced their Chicken McNuggets to the world, which turned out to be one of the most successful new product launches in fast food history. To this day, McNuggets still account for about 10 percent of restaurant sales.
Today chicken nuggets are a quintessentially American food: easily mass-produced and a quick, convenient protein source that can be eaten on the go. And eat them we do. On average, Americans consume about 2.3 billion servings of chicken nuggets each year.
Robert Baker spent his entire academic life at Cornell University (1957–1989) and published some 290 research papers. In 1970 he founded the university's Institute of Food Science and Marketing. Baker was elected a fellow of the Institute of Food Technologies in 1997.
He is accredited with more than 40 poultry, turkey, and cold cut innovations. In addition to creating the chicken nugget, he is also responsible for a revolutionary way to bind breading to chicken, co-invented the machine responsible for deboning chicken and created the chicken and turkey hot dogs and turkey ham.
Because of his contributions to the poultry sciences, he is a member of the American Poultry Hall of Fame.
Mr. Baker died on March 13, 2006. But the little nugget he created back in 1950 live on forever. In fact sales of frozen chicken nuggets are $1.1 billion annually. As for McDonald’s, it serves 37 million McNuggets a day.
Awesome Quotes by Awesome People
“Things don’t turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.”— James A. Garfield