Borden came to Utah's milk processing industry as the Borden Western Company (a subsidiary of the Borden Condensed Milk Company) which built a milk condensing plant in Logan in 1916. The Morning Milk Company opened its milk condensing plant in Wellsville in 1923. The Carnation name came to Utah in 1946 when the Carnation Company bought the plants of the Morning Milk Company. The Wellsville plant was closed in 1963 and sold in 1967.

In 1924 Clarence Birdseye was the pioneer in the development of commercial food freezing. By 1930 over six million pounds of frozen food, including fruits, vegetables, and seafood, had been shipped. During the 1930s the railroads began the development of refrigerator cars that were capable of maintaining temperatures low enough to ship frozen foods, using ice to maintain the required low temperatures. The first mechanical refrigerator cars, which didn't need ice to maintain freezing temperatures, came into use during 1949 in the East, for frozen Florida orange juice, and during 1952 in the West, for all of the fresh-frozen fruits and vegetables that were beginning to come out of California's central valley. The industry grew with phenomenal rapidity.