Cash at Zero F.

With barely a glance at the weekend customers milling about the corner butcher shop, Mrs. Stanley Coultas walked into the Halliburton Cold Storage Locker Plant in Des Moines, opened her personal food locker, took out a chunk of mutton, a package of green beans. That was all she needed : her husband is in the Army, she lives alone. But against the day when her soldier comes home on furlough the 350-lb. locker is packed with good things to eat -- parts of two sheep, big pieces of beef and pork, five fat chickens, some wall-eyed pike, a panful of crappies, asparagus, beans, peaches.

Hunters & Farmers. Thus last week a unique and thriving industry was helping some 1,250,000 U.S. families through the present food-crisis. The industry: frozen-food lockers. Founded by hunters in World War I, perfected and expanded by farmers in the late '30s, the food-locker business is now operating at record levels. Scattered through 46 states are 4,600 locker plants (1938 total: 1,269), with some 300 private lockers apiece. Many earn 30 to 100% annual profit on their investment. Business is so good that plants have waiting lists of 10 to 500 customers; new plants are going up as fast as Government priorities, regulations -- and the black market -- will permit.

Success secret of these food banks is primer-simple: better food at less cost.

The citizen rents a locker at $7-$20 a year, buys meat, vegetables and fruit at wholesale prices, stores it away, eats it months or even years later. For safe preservation, most locker plants use the "sharp-freeze" method, whereby food is flash-frozen at minus 20-30DEG F., wrapped in special paper, stored away in the lockers at zero. Modern food banks are really small local packing plants. For the farmer some food banks will slaughter, chill, cut, smoke or freeze, and package. For the urbanite they buy whole sides of beef from the meat wholesaler, cut it to chops, store it away. Extra charges: 1-c- to 5-c- a Ib. Even so, locker renters save 50 to 75% compared with retail meat prices; many a farmer eats choice beef for 8 1/2c a lb.

Packers and Canners. Typical food-locker plant is Los Angeles' Frosted Food Lockers, Inc., which started in 1940 with 1,500 knocked-down white enameled lockers (cost: $1.50 each) and an eye on a local ice plant. The outfit thrived from the start. All lockers were paid off the first year. Last fall the rush piled 2,500 deer nearly 30 feet high in the cutting room and the annual gross hit $20,000--good for any local business.

This prosperity has brought trouble. With a fat slice of their business going into private lockers, the big packers and canners started an all-out push to head off the newcomer. When war started WPB slapped a pile of restrictions on food-locker plants and equipment, forced prospective builders through at least six different agencies before they even sniffed a priority. Then out of nowhere came the rumor: food lockers were to blame for the meat shortage. Even the industry fell down: WPB ordered locker manufacturers to stop chiseling on steel.

Suddenly things got better. OPA dug into U.S. food lockers, came up announcing that they held less than 1% of the nation's meat supply. Better still, OPA declared locker-meat would be considered home supply, would not be rationed. WPB followed through by easing restrictions on locker-box output. Last week Washington agreed with Mrs. Coultas of Des Moines --food lockers were a good thing, for those who had them.

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