More importantly, all these factories don't mind sharing their tours with travelers like us, and we certainly appreciate that. We started at Martin's Potato Chips. We obviously wanted to be here, as we set the alarm early and drove 25 minutes to arrive before 9:00 (and that's a.m.--not p.m.). At one time in our lives that would be no big deal, but since we retired we seem to have a hard time getting around that early. We were greeted by Dennis, a retired Martin's employee, who gave us a top-notch tour that started with an 18-wheeler dumping a full load of potatoes at the factory. We found that the easiest way to unload potatoes is to hydraulically lift the truck to a 45-degree angle.
The potatoes start their journey through the factory with a nice soaking bath and a massage over the rubber rollers to loosen the field dirt. It looks like a spa day for the spuds, until they get to the peeler and slicers inside.
Those slices are dropped into the vegetable oil, and stirred with automated flippers for most of the fry time. They do get a little personal attention with a stir from the fry-master. We are seeing the popular kettle-cooked chips in this section of the factory, while the traditional thinner chips are on another line right behind this cooker. It is awesome to be so close to actually feel the heat and see the action right in front of us. This is an unusual company to allow us inside their food factory and encourage us to take pictures.
When they are just the right color of golden brown, they are lifted out of the hot oil into the conveyor system that will cool and drain them as they move across the factory. This experience has turned each pound of fresh potatoes into 1/4 pound of potato chips. Too bad that consuming them doesn't cause the same weight loss.
At the end of the conveyor system, they are hit with very fine salt before they head into the electronic light chamber. Through a process too complicated for us to comprehend, this machine can spot a bad chip and use a puff of air to remove it.
That's when Dennis scooped up a pan of fresh potato chips for us to sample. They were still warm from the fryer, yet already crispy. That would be Mark's hand caught in the potato chips again.
That hand picture doesn't show Mark modeling the hair net that is required of everyone on the factory floor, so Denisa had to slip in that picture too. Martin's is a relatively small chip company, but there were several more fryers behind him, as well as a kettle corn station.
We are a big fan of kettle corn, and we got to have samples of the warm sugary popcorn straight off the line too.
We next went to the bagging room, and the control room. We took a picture of the six-screen monitor that keeps an eye on the different areas of the factory.
Our last stop was the warehouse, where the boxes stacked to the ceiling represent a three-day supply of product. Because freshness is of utmost importance in the world of potato chips, all of these cases will be out of the warehouse and into the grocery stores within three days. We also learned that the bags of potato chips are filled with nitrogen, which will keep them fresher than an oxygen-filled bag.
Martin's sent us home with small bags of chips for free, plus a discount off the already low prices in their outlet store. We made a nice haul of snacks as we left the factory.
Because we are living in the snack food capitol of the country, we also scheduled factory tours at Snyder's Pretzel Factory and Utz Quality Foods. Both of those companies have great tours, but you see the action from a glassed observation deck and there are no warm samples. Also, none of the other places allow any photos, so you'll just have to imagine conveyor belts full of pretzels at Snyder's. They do, however, have a place for photos at the outlet store, where Denisa proudly displays our purchases there.
Likewise, Utz has a display case of their products that makes for a good picture. They'll never be as big as Frito-Lays, but they have a good chunk of the market in this section of the country.
We are still mesmerized by the process of making and packaging snack foods, and can't believe they can make them available for such low prices in their outlet stores. After visiting three companies' tours and outlet stores we came home with quite a load of snacks. For a moment we forgot that we live in a motor home with limited storage space. But all the bags are unique snack flavors and types, and all of this cost around $10.
Our next fast factory tour was at the soft pretzel bakery, where they were forming the pretzels by hand.
We didn't mean to buy a pretzel, but they were getting a fresh batch out of the oven. That smell and a good salesman sold us one that was so good we forgot to take a picture until after we tried it.
Our next factory tour doesn't include food, and we didn't even buy any samples. That's because the custom-made instruments made by Bluett Brothers Violins can cost around $15,000. Mark Bluett is a master luthier--which means he can make any kind of stringed instrument by hand. He's been doing just that for the last 30 years. We found that the golden brown color on the finished instruments starts with a wash of egg whites, and then dark tea.
He took us back into his workroom, where we saw the forms used to mold the wooden sides of a violin. He also showed us the hard-wood back of a violin in process, that he was hand carving into the bowed shape that will make the sound resonate.
He was also in the process of forming the neck, which is cut from a single piece of wood, and then hand-carved into a piece of art.
He was surprised that our tour group knew that a violin bow is made of horse's hair. But we didn't know that the finest bows are made with the white hair from a Welsh horse raised in the cold climates of northern Europe. That single horse's tail cost $600, and the process of successfully restringing a bow is very tedious.
For the next factory tour, we are heading south of town to Perrydell Farms. That's where these ladies are stocking up on silage as they wait for the gates to open on the milking barn.
They obviously like going to work, as they crowded into the milking barn. We watched as they were washed and hooked onto the automatic milkers. Each cow on the Perrydell Farm produces about 8 gallons of milk per day, so this is a very productive factory.
The other product from this "factory" are the baby calves that are housed in over-sized dog houses right outside the barn. Since the dairy cows can't feed these calves while they are being milked, they are bottle fed. Denisa used to bottle feed orphan calves on the farm when she was growing up, so she really enjoyed this part of this factory tour. Since their mothers were busy in the factory, she was happy to give them a little motherly attention.
It was almost feeding time, and these calves were certainly hoping that Denisa was bringing supper. She would have loved to serve on the supper crew, and her years of experience might just have gotten her the job.
Our trip to the farm also gave us another form of entertainment. The owner told us they had hired a local Amish family to take down an old silo that is no longer used. It was interesting to watch the process of taking down that rural skyscraper tile by tile.
We also noticed the trees close to the calves' pens were ready for harvest. We had never seen chestnut trees before, but we found the pods and the chestnuts on the ground.
After our fun in the barnyard, we spent some time in the farm market store. Perrydell bottles its milk, so we bought some of their skim and chocolate milk. They also make some interesting ice cream flavors like pumpkin roll, salty cow, raspberry truffle, milky way, and chocolate covered strawberry. We wanted to try all of them, but this time we remembered that we live in a motor home and limited ourselves to the chocolate-covered-strawberry ice cream. We need to quit going to factory tours before our motor home and we gain too much weight!
No comments:
Post a Comment