A backblocks inventor

Press, 30 August 1978, Page 19

A backblocks inventor

Norma McCulloch lives in the back blocks of Manawatu and she has succeeded as an inventor through her knowledge of deep freezing and an inventive mind. Deep freezing became a matter of necessity for Norma when she settled with her family on a seven-acre property in Rongotea. about 15km out of Palmerston North. “To avoid frequent trips to town. I froze a great deal of food and the seasonal vegetables from the garden to cut down on costs,” Norma says. Eventually she realised that something was missing from deep-freezing techniques. “One of the requirements in deep freezing is to remove all the air from the plastic bags containing food to create a vacuum,” said Norma. “If all the air is not removed, ice crystals form in the bags which rob the food of moisture, colour and flavour.” There were three ways to get the air out: by pushing it out by hand, sucking it out with a straw or the mouth, or forcing it out by placing the bags in water.

“All these methods were inefficient, unhealthy or too messy,” she said. One day she saw her daughter using a bicycle pump and realised that she needed something similar — but it should work in reverse. The first vacuum pump was made from two rolls of cardbord, a piece of plastic and some sellotape. A smaller tube of cardboard fitted inside a larger

tube and a piece of plastic was stapled over the hole in the end to act as a valve. The whole thing was held together with sellotape,” said Norma. The commercial potential of the pump was not realised immediately, but when she started using it at deep freezing demonstrations people asked her where they could buy one. In 1968 patents were taken out on the pump and a more sophisticated model was designed with tin-plate end pieces. Initially 1000 pumps were manufactured in Petone but production increased rapidly as the demand grew on the local market. Later, when Norma

demonstrated deep-freez-ing methods on television this enabled her to show the public her new way of removing the air from plastic bags. Her break into the export market came in 1970 when she wrote a book entitled “Deep Freeze Cookery,” which sold throughout New Zealand and Australia. The book contained a number of illustrations of

the freezer vacuum pump so she decided to follow up its publication in Australia with a one-woman trade mission across the Tasman. “I had no money for advertising so I approached the biggest department stores in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane and offered to demonstrate the vacuum pump and freezer techniques in the stores,” Norma said. “The stores agreed to stock double the number of vacuum pumps I could sell during the demonstrations.” She took 10,000 pumps with her to a.New Zealand trade show in South Wales and hired a stand at the Kenilworth Royal Agricul-

tural Show, in England, a few weeks later. More than 2000 pumps were sold from her stands at the shows and the remainder were sold to a company which wanted to act as the British distributor. Similar successes were achieved in Canada where Norma sold 10,000 vacuum pumps at the Toronto Trade Fair. In 1976 her son, Richard, joined his mother in the business as export sales director; he has succeeded in negotiating for the sale of 150,000 pumps to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. “We are planning to produce a more sophisticated pump — initially for the American market — which will be washable and made of plastic instead of cardboard and aluminium,” said Richard. The pump is also being adapted to the Japanese market where a slimmer version is required to fit the smaller hands of the Japanese women. Norma says that her exports so far are only the beginning for her vacuum pump. “There is no other product like it on the world markets and we hold the patents for it.”

Trom the Department of Trade and Industry