Albert P. Halfhill
Early life. Halfhill was born on November 25, 1847, in Morrow County, Ohio, near the village of Cardington. He was the son of Moses Halfhill, a farmer, and Lydia Halfhill (). Halfhill had two brothers and was educated in the public schools of Mercer and St. Mary's, Ohio. Career. Halfhill's first job was as a teacher for two years in Deep Cut, Ohio. He moved on to begin his career in business as a clerk in a hardware store in St. Marys, Ohio. He was a partner with August Decker for a few years in a  dry goods business in St. Mary's. He then moved to Van Wert, Ohio, and in 1875 he purchased a grocery store that he operated with Lester Paterson. He married Sarah Elizabeth Phillips on January 11, 1874. They moved to Mankato, Minnesota, in 1884, where he was one of the founders of the wholesale grocery firm of Patterson, Halfhill, & Zimmerman. He sold a line of groceries throughout the state of Minnesota for several years as a branch of this firm. His wife's health failed in 1892 and they decided to move to Southern California for a more favorable environment . Halfhill and Robert Ward, a Los Angeles merchant, wanted to purchase the machinery of San Francisco's Golden Gate Packing Company, which had just gone out of business. They did not have enough money to do this, so they approached Joseph H. Lapham, a wealthy merchant, for financial help. They bought the fish-packing machinery and formed the Southern California Fish Company with Lapham as its president. Halfhill, Ward, and Lapham were the stockholders in the new firm. In 1893, they constructed a two-story fish packing factory plant on Terminal Island at San Pedro Bay, where they packed sardines . The sardine-packing business was prosperous for ten years. In 1903, the sardine harvest failed in San Pedro Bay for some unknown reason, forcing Halfhill to look for other seafood he could pack to keep his plant running. In his travels, he had picked up a can of Italian canned tuna and brought it back to his plant to see if he could copy it. Halfhill began experimenting packing fish like coast rock cod, albacore tuna, and halibut that he found were plentiful in the Pacific Ocean. He experimented by removing natural fish oils and substituting them with salad oils , such as olive or cottonseed oil. Albacore was unattractive and called the "hog of the sea" by fisheries, and was not usually eaten at all before Halfhill came up with a process that made the meat more desirable. He discovered that steaming the albacore tuna then replacing its fish oil produced a white meat with a texture like chicken. Halfhill first canned tuna produced by this method as a commercial product in 1907. In 1908, he sold 250 cases (packaged in pound cans) of cooked Albacore tuna with his unique formula to a grocery store owner in Los Angeles named  H. Jevne. Its employees and customers didn't know it was albacore tuna. Halfhill used the tagline "chicken of the sea" to promote sales, and was the first to use this slogan. Halfhill's primacy was proven in a later court case: he used it in 1908 and again when he sold his canned tuna to the Seaman Brothers of New York in 1909.The product did not sell well at first because Americans were unfamiliar with it being a food for consumption, but Jevne promoted it and the public discovered they liked the mild taste of the white meat. It  became a successful seller in New York before it was in California. Southern California canning companies were packing 115,000 cases of canned tuna per year by 1912. That production doubled two years later. From 1912, Frank Van Camp and other fish packers built canneries throughout California and Oregon for the manufacture and sale of this cooked canned tuna. Starting in 1914, they took up the brand names Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea, and StarKist. Halfhill built the Halfhill Tuna Packing Company in Long Beach, California, in January 1915. It was an extensive canning factory for the time, with a  secret brand process for packing tuna. Halfhill constructed this new company with his sons Charles and Harry, using the funds they made from the sale of their holdings in the Southern California Fish Company. In December he had built a fleet of eight fishing boats for gathering tuna out into the Pacific Ocean in Tacoma, Washington. Later life. In 1919, the Halfhill Tuna Packing Company was renamed to Halfhill Packing Corporation. Halfhill is considered by fisheries as the father of the tuna-packing industry. Captain Halfhill, an honorary title bestowed on him by his competitors, retired in 1922. His sons  Charles and Harry took over the business which subsequently sold about 200,000 cases of tuna, sardines, and mackerel yearly to major cities throughout the United States. Halfhill, after a short illness, died at his Los Angeles home at the age of 76 on May 7, 1924. At the time, canned tuna was produced by 36 tuna canneries on the west coast of the United States. By 1926, the "chicken of the sea"-style of cooked canned tuna became a staple in the American diet as the price became more affordable.