With ice-houses spaced along his route, he was soon able to sell his beef in Boston, nearly 1,000 miles away. What Swift had invented was the chill-chain: refrigerated delivery routes that were the last piece of the food logistics puzzle. With aggressive marketing and cut-throat prices, Chicago meatpackers soon persuaded Bostonians and New Yorkers that factory beef slaughtered hundreds of miles away was better than fresh meat from their local butchers. Industrial food – and cheap meat – had arrived.
