Posts Tagged “factory tours”

We had so much fun today at Avery Island, home of Tabasco!

This is one intense, Tabasco-loving place. Our adventure began at the Tabasco Visitor Center, where we were treated to a few small exhibits and a brief talk and video explaining Tabasco’s history and how it is made.

Okay, between you and me, I’ve never been that big a fan of Tabasco, and neither has Brian. But how it’s made is really interesting! First it starts with these peppers:

They are Tabasco peppers and they are grown there on Avery Island and also in South America (where there is a similar climate and they can grow year-round). They save seeds, though, so even the South American peppers are originally from Avery Island. All the peppers are hand-harvested, and workers are each issued one of these:

That is le petit bâton rouge, a stick painted the correct shade of red for perfect pepper ripeness. When the peppers match le bâton, they are harvested, then they are ground up along with a small amount of salt (also from Avery Island; there is a huge salt mine underneath the island — allegedly the salt mine is as deep as Mount Everest is high) into a “mash” :

The mash is then placed into these white oak barrels to age (at this point, at the South American pepper farms, the barrels are transported to Avery Island — all Tabasco ages at the warehouse there). The barrels are topped with a thick layer of salt from the island and allowed to ferment. The salt layer allows gases to escape without letting any impurities in. They sit there aging for about 3 years!

Another interesting aspect is that they are a no-waste company (which they reminded us many times!). When the barrels are no longer usable, they are chopped up into wood chips for cooking and sold in the extensive on-island gift shop.

Anyway, after aging for 3 years, the mash is then strained, mixed with vinegar and more salt from the island, and placed into another barrel where is it stirred intermittently for the next 28 days:

And then, finally, it is bottled and sent all over the world!

We got to walk through a wall of windows into the bottling plant; they were bottling the jalapeño variety that day. Yay!

The original Tabasco flavor is the only one that goes through the aging and everything, by the way.

After all that, we visited the gift shop where we could sample a bunch of products. They had all the Tabasco flavors, of course, but also some products made with Tabasco, including chili and ice cream. Brian tried some Tabasco cola, and I think the pictures tell the whole story:

We also learned that the word tabasco is actually from a Native American word meaning “land of hot and humid,” which quite aptly describes the climate on Avery Island. Check out the steam on Brian’s glasses and the camera lens from this photo snapped on our way out of the chilly, air-conditioned gift shop into the Tabasco-like outdoor climate:

Now, that was a lot of fun for one day, but it wasn’t over yet!!

The dude who invented Tabasco, Edmund McIlhenny, has spawned generations of family members who remain heavily involved in Tabasco sauce production. They select the best pepper plants and still own the company and live on the island and everything. But seeing how they are all zillionaires due to the wild success of Tabasco, it’s no wonder that some of the McIlhennys have chosen a slightly different path. One such McIlhenny was Edmund’s son Edward, who ran the company from 1898-1949. He did a good job of managing Tabasco, but he also pursued his other passions as a naturalist and conservationist, and he established Jungle Gardens on Avery Island as a refuge for the snowy egret (the refuge helped pull the snowy egret back from the brink of extinction). Jungle Gardens also contains many interesting exotic plants, a nearly 1000-year-old Buddha statue, and a lot (and I mean A LOT) of these:

YAY! I love an alligator. They are so cute! These are just little ones, too, so they are not very scary, although I’m sure they could hurt you if they felt like moving, which they did not because it was nine million degrees out. We didn’t see any snowy egrets because they had already migrated south, but we saw some other exciting birds:

And some really large bamboo:

After all that, we finally headed north toward Jackson, Mississippi. We have family events going on for the next few days, then we’ll be regrouping. Stay tuned!

We left Milford this morning and headed over to Norwalk, Conn., because we had heard of this place called Stew Leonard’s, reputed to be the World’s Largest Dairy Store. When we got there, we were kind of disappointed to see what looked like just a regular grocery store from the outside, but we decided to venture in anyway, just in case. We were not disappointed! Stew’s houses its own milk bottling plant right inside the store:

And as if that weren’t enough, it also houses a variety of animatronic figures that sing and dance while you browse for groceries. For example, there is singing animatronic butter:

There’s also a band of singing milk cartons, a lobster trapeze artist, singing lettuce and bananas, a talking cow, etc., etc., etc. The other cool thing about Stew’s is that they have information readily available about where their products come from with photos of the farms and the like. They also have a live video feed of their own dairy farm:

As Brian said, that’s transparency!

So after that, we got on the road and went through several states, starting with New York:

Then, New Jersey:

Then, briefly, Delaware!

Then, Pennsylvania:

In Penn., we made a stop at the Herr Foods snack factory to take their factory tour.

It was a great tour — one of the best we’ve done. We learned all about how Jim Herr started the company with, like, a single kettle and a potato peeler, and we saw pretzels, popcorn, and chips being made. We were the only people on the tour at that point (we totally dodged a bullet because an entire busload of schoolchildren had been on the tour before ours), so that was really fun. Our tour guide went onto the manufacturing floor towards the end of the tour and filled a giant bag of freshly cooked potato chips just for us! They were still warm and everything. Obviously, we are now obsessed with Herr’s. Check out our giant potato chip bag!

Thanks, Herr Foods!

After that, we continued into Maryland:

We met up with some friends for dinner, which was fantabulous as always, and then we headed home. We’re back in D.C. now and have about a week to recover before we get back on the road again!! We have a lot to do this week, of course, but we’ll try to check in, especially if there are any balcony updates.