How do you convince retailers to stock new kitchen equipment? How do you persuade consumers to purchase newfangled appliances? International Harvester faced these questions in the late 1940s when the company introduced its new line of freezers and refrigerators expressly designed for home use.
For International Harvester, the shift to home refrigeration was only a matter of time. As increasing numbers of farm and rural residents gained electrical power following President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 Rural Electrification Act, the company saw an opportunity to expand beyond farm equipment. IH had developed and sold milk coolers and walk-in freezers for farm use in the years before World War II. After the war, it converted an aircraft carrier plant in Evansville, Indiana, and began manufacturing 11-cubic-foot “deep freezers” designed for the rural home and 4-cubic-foot freezers for the smaller needs of the urban home.1 Refrigerators with freezer compartments soon followed.
Yet selling these products for home use was no easy task. As IH soon realized, “Selling to women—who buy almost all refrigeration products—was new to the Company.”2 What’s more, it required a radical shift in consumers’ thinking. Since the nineteenth century, canning had been a critical summer and fall activity for many families, conserving food for later months. Now people needed to be persuaded that the same work could be done more easily and effectively through freezing. Who could convince IH’s primary customers that they could save money and use their time more
