How ketchup is made -- I used work at Hunt's!
Bryan Eggers
to college. Just thought I'd give you a thumbnail sketch about what
happened there, and how they made Hunt's Ketchup. The process
is the same at Heinz or any other cannery.
First, the canneries are faced with a logistical problem -- all
tomatoes are picked within a 2-3 month window. An entire year's
work of this "basic ingredient" arrives in a very short time. These
tomatoes must processed so that they can be used for products all year.
Here's how it works.
An endless line of trucks enter the cannery 24 hrs a day. The tomatoes
are packed into wooden bins about 3' x 3' x 5'.
A fork lift driver grabs two bins side-by-side and drops them on
a moving conveyor chain-belt. As a bin moves forward it gets pulled
at a 90 degree angle into a pneumatic gadget (that I operated) called
the "bin dump" which turns it upside down, dumping the tomatoes into
a one of many water flumes. This is a huge recycled man-made stream
that begins outside the cannery and flows inside the building. It
serves a few purposes, but the main one is to give a preliminary
cleaning to the tomatoes and give the mice a chance to swim for their
lives. Actually, the mice don't survive (don't panic, I'll explain
this in a second). Where do the mice come from? Well, while the bins of
tomatoes are sitting out in the field they become home to all kinds of
wildlife. The mice and rats are supposed to get drowned in the flume.
Now the tomatoes (and assorted junk) float onto a "riser" which is
like a escalator. It lifts the tomatoes about 30 feet (through a hole
in the side of the building) and drops them into a smaller flume.
During this step the tomatoes are also sprayed with water for additional
cleaning.
This flume moves the tomatoes onto a flat conveyor belt. I guess
you'd have to say that this next step is the most "unscientific"
process in the cannery business. This process (and the godawful smell of
that place) are what made me stop eating ketchup for about two years.
A bunch of women (constantly talking to each other) inspect the tomatoes
as they move along the belt. Their job is to pick out the dead rats,
mice, bugs, leaves, and other junk that is mixed in with the tomatoes.
They also pick out any tomatoes that are obviously defective -- unripe or
half-eaten by birds and mice, etc. Like I said, this process isn't what
you'd call perfect.
The tomatoes receive some additional cleaning and then are basically split
into two groups. One group involves tomatoes that will be
canned "whole". These tomatoes obviously must pass through some
additional visual inspection. Eventually, these tomatoes drop into a
machine that peels them and puts an appropriate weight combination
into a can. Since the rest of this process has nothing to do with ketchup,
I'll just say that the canned tomatoes move through an oven where
they are cooked (in the sealed can). Enough of that.
All the remaining tomatoes are turned into a paste. This is really the
secret of how canneries deal with tomatoes. They seal the paste in huge
cans and store them in a cool place -- sometimes for years. This paste
is the basic ingredient for all kinds of tomatoe-related products, so
later in the year the cannery just taps into its paste reserves when it
wants to make ketchup, source, sauces, etc. The important thing to note
here is that canneries don't store huge amounts of finished goods.
Storing paste gives them much more flexibility.
Incidentally, this means that your ketchup bottle may have been made
from tomatoes that were actually picked months or years ago. This
doesn't mean that there's anything defective about it. Paste is
designed for long-term storage. Imagine if the tomato crop was wiped
out one year. If that happened, the canneries would just go deeper into
their paste reserves.
Anyway, I'll just touch briefly on the remainging paste and ketchup steps.
Various machines smash the tomatoes and the resulting mess
goes into huge (we're talkin' HUGE) stainless steel vats for cooking.
This is where the other paste ingredients are added -- if they're just
making paste. During the time I worked there, workers occasionally fell
into these vats of boiling hot paste and got killed (seriously). And yes,
they do clean out the vat if that happens, and no, they don't try to use
the paste for anything else.
If they're just making paste, the paste is pumped to the canning
lines, sealed in big cans and (at Hunt's) stored deep underground.
I had to work down there one day and it was the worst job I ever had
in my life. When they needed paste, you'd grab one of these huge cans
and smash it down on a sharp metal spike. The paste glops out of the
can and then flows through a flume back over to the vats for processing.
Incidentally, the air was unbreathable down there. They actually had
little tubes of pumped-in air that you'd breathe from. Can you believe it?
Back to the vats. During this process, if they are making ketchup that
day, they add the ingredients that you're all familiar with. Eventually,
this concoction gets pumped over to another part of the cannery for
bottling. This is where the bottles are filled, capped, labeled and boxed.
These finished bottles of ketchup are stored in the warehouse and shipped
to your local food distributor.
A couple of other tidbits I learned at Hunt's. The cherries in fruit
cocktail are white when picked. They are dyed red in other vats so they'll
look the way you think cherries should look. Also, pickles are dyed green
-- to make them look like pickles.
Hope you found this interesting. By the way, I always liked Heinz ketchup
better.
Bryan
Steve Thomas
<74403...@compuserve.com>) wrote:
-snip-
>The tomatoes receive some additional cleaning and then are basically split
>into two groups. One group involves tomatoes that will be
>canned "whole". These tomatoes obviously must pass through some
>additional visual inspection. Eventually, these tomatoes drop into a
>machine that peels them and puts an appropriate weight combination
>into a can. Since the rest of this process has nothing to do with ketchup,
>I'll just say that the canned tomatoes move through an oven where
>they are cooked (in the sealed can). Enough of that.
They only peel the tomatoes that are canned whole? They use a
"machine" to peel them?
Many factories peel the tomatoes that are used for ketchup. If you're
peeling tomatoes at home, you scald the tomatoes with hot water, and
the skin slips right off. In the factory, they go one better: they
scald the tomatoes with live steam, and the skin virtually *explodes*
off them; they are inspected by hand to remove any skin that doesn't
wash off.
-snip -
>A couple of other tidbits I learned at Hunt's. The cherries in fruit
>cocktail are white when picked. They are dyed red in other vats so they'll
>look the way you think cherries should look. Also, pickles are dyed green
>-- to make them look like pickles.
I knew that they dyed maraschino cherries and the cherries in fruit
cocktail. I think they pick them before they are ripe so that they
will be firmer. If you can ripe cherries, they get all mushy, like the
cherries in cherry pie.
On the other hand, pickles are *not* necessarily dyed, much less dyed
green.
I was just looking at a jar of Aunt Jane's bread and butter chips, and
it has some Yellow 5 in it, and polysorbate 80. Polysorbate is a
surfactant (detergent); I suppose it is in there as a mordant (so that
the pickles soak up the dye.)
On the other hand, Sechler Kosher Dills contain no coloring at all. I
don't think Sechler uses dye in *any* of their pickles. Sechler is an
old family business that distributes mostly in the midwest. They are
mostly producers of sweet pickles and relishes. There's little
difference between one hamburger chip and another, but sweet pickles
vary a *lot*, so people will pay premium prices for a good product.
Dill pickles vary a lot, too. They are fermented, sometimes for years
and years before the product canned, and the spices will vary a lot
from producer to producer. If you remember Klinger (in M*A*S*H)
talking about the pickles at Tony Packo's, well, those are Sechler
pickles.
BTW, there's a connection between pickles and tomatoes. They are
usually grown by the same farmers, using the same laborers. They raise
the pickles in order to provide early-season employment, hoping that
this will help them attract the best pickers. Stoop labor is VERY hard
work and it's difficult to hire enough people to do it.
When the FLOC (Farm Labor Organizing Committee) started up in
Northwest Ohio, Campbell's Soup in Napoleon (world's largest food
factory) stopped buying tomatoes from anyone who picked by hand. They
decided being free of labor difficulties was more important than using
ripe tomatoes; when you pick by machine, it's a one-shot deal, ripping
the vines out of the ground, and the tomatoes are in various stages of
ripeness.
That put a lot of small tomato farmers out of the tomato business. A
tomato picker is only affordable if you have a *lot* of acreage. Our
family had stopped before that, but there were six of us kids, and we
raised an acre of tomatoes every year, picking them without hiring
anyone outside the family. It paid for a lot of college tuition, and
during the peak season, an acre was more than we could keep picked. We
only got a few cents a pound from the local ketchup factory, but
early-season tomatoes (before the factory opened) got sold at our
roadside stand for up to 25c a pound. At a time when minimum wage was
$1 an hour, that was highly profitable!
Pickles and cucumbers generate a hormone when they get to a certain
size, which stops the plant from blooming. If you pick them while they
are small, you end up with more total poundage of cukes/pickles, AND
you get a premium price for them: the smaller the pickle, the more
valuable it is. Large cukes are seedier and have a coarser flavor,
which is why you find the big ones being used for hamburger dills and
the teeny ones used as sweet gherkhins. (If you are buying seed to
plant, gherkin is a variety - but if you are buying canned pickles, it
is only a size.)
Bryan Eggers
>They use a "machine" to peel them?
most people held their breath and ran through that particular area
whenever they had to get to the bathroom or breakroom. The smell
and humidity was nauseating. Suffice to say the entire cleaning
process uses water, steam, machines and humans. A friend of mine
who was a floor manager inside told me Hunt's had some proprietary
tricks for handling tomatoes but the details were lost on me -- I
only cared about finding some breathable air.
> On the other hand, pickles are *not* necessarily dyed, much less dyed
> green.
There was a story going around at the time that an old-timer had
fallen into a pickle vat and had been dyed green. And supposedly,
his wife made him sit on newspapers for the ride home. One day I
got up enough nerve to ask the guy about it and he nearly killed
me so I never pursued it.
It just depends on what they using the pickles for. Pickles
are used in lots of different products. Also, remember that a
cannery caters not only to supermarkets but to high-volume
commercial food suppliers (imagine the number of perfectly sliced
green pickles used by McDonald's, Wendy's, Carl's Jr and Burger King).
If the customer expectations for that finished product called for
green pickles, it was really easy to make 'em all a nice, uniform color.
Otherwise, the canneries would have to throw away all the half-ripe or
discolored products -- and believe me, they don't throw away anything
unless it has a tail.