Chip Trip

This morning, the MOMS Club toured a local potato chip factory. I don't know how much information Peeper absorbed, but I found it fascinating.

And they gave us each (every kid and every adult) a bag with five "snack size" (comparable to the "Big Grab" not the tiny ones) bags of snacks - regular potato chips, homestyle potato chips, barbecue potato chips (what we saw being made today), cheese puffies and popcorn!

The potatos are coming in to the room already peeled (they essentially sand off the skin). In the foreground, you can see them dropping into the slicer and coming out sliced on the right, then heading into the fryer.

And out of the fryer. That box of white stuff that they're passing under to the right is - you guessed it - salt. Then, onto a conveyer and across the way . . .

. . . the cooked chips come in on the conveyer that you see at the top and then go down one of three conveyers where they are seasoned (from the metal funnels above, we saw the guy scooping those full of barbecue flavored powder) and weighed (2 and 6 ounce packages today - they weigh within 1 gram, which is a couple of chips) then down into the bags, which come as one roll of foil/plastic and are formed into a tube, sealed in back, filled and then the bottom/top is sealed and they are cut.

The filled bags then go onto these turntables, where the ladies grab them and put them in boxes. The box is filled, closed, labeled and stacked up, ready to ship.