I’ve been researching Cornish Game Hens to see if any of my recipes for wild game birds might be appropriate. After all, they’re Game Hens, right?
Wrong. They’re chickens. Just young chickens. What my parents used to call spring chickens.
Here’s the Cornish Game Hen story–
In 1966, when Don Tyson was working his way toward his goal of monopolizing the chicken distribution market, his salespeople sold fresh chickens packed in ice. They needed to be sold fast lest they spoil. “Sell ‘em or smell ‘em†was the marketing motto.
Chickens were easier to sell when they were somewhat scarce, and the price was higher. But favorable sales conditions attracted more suppliers, which drove the price down and financially stressed the smaller suppliers. Tyson was able to tolerate the price fluctuations, but he wasn’t happy about it.
He became interested in an East Coast chicken producer with the odd-sounding name of Washington Creamery. Don wasn’t just interested in buying out the company’s market share. He wanted to buy a new market altogether. Washington Creamery wasn’t just selling ice-packed chicken; it specialized in selling “game hens,†which were small birds sold in shrink-wrapped plastic. What caught Don’s imagination about game hens was their price: 50 cents. Every bird carried that same price tag, 50 cents, regardless of what the underlying price of chicken was. Don saw this as a kind of Holy Grail: a chicken product that could hold its value even when the markets gyrated. There was something even better: Game hens were sold frozen. So, if supply outstripped demand, Tyson could store its birds and wait until the market recovered before selling them.
Soon after Tyson bought Washington Creamery in 1966, the company Marketing Department began creating the perception that game hens were some kind of luxury item, calling them “Cornish game hens.†The renaming created an exotic appeal for the product and added air of nobility to it, as if it were the kind of dish that was served by butlers after a fox hunt.
It was just Marketing hype. All of Tyson’s chickens were Cornish birds, as everyone in the industry knew. The Cornish breed had been selected as the industry standard because it grew fast. The only difference between a Cornish Game Hen and an ice-packed chicken was that Tyson killed the game hen when it was younger. It was just a smaller chicken, wrapped in plastic and frozen, given a better name and sold at a fixed price.
A spring chicken.
But I bought into it. “You don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle.â€
