Recently I was on vacation in Birmingham, Alabama visiting my sister and fellow KOS member Sharistuff. A little backstory my sister has been living in Alabama for over 25 years and I've been visiting her that long. I usually stay away from tourist stuff but I wanted to do something different this time so it was down to two choices. Birmingham has quite wonderful attractions including the Civil Rights Museum and the Vulcan but I was intrigued by a museum that had Hitler's tea service which sounded off the wall as well as a tour of the Golden Flake factory (local snack chip company).
I haven't been on a tour of a food factory since I was a little kid and my class went to the Twin Pines Milk company in Detroit. I don't remember much about this tour except getting a small carton of milk at the end and I don't even like milk. So when the opportunity to go see how potato chips are made I jumped at it.
The Golden Flake company has been around since 1923 and in this megalithic global economy I just have to salute them for putting out a product that can compete with other giant snack chip companies like Lay's. The factory is located in Titusville (or Titsville as my sister calls it) and they let you actually go on the floor with the machines and potatos going full tilt in a Rube Goldberg set-up that looks to be original equipment.
The day we took our tour there were a group of 5-6 year olds taking the same tour so we got a big kick out of watching them marvel at the machines cranking out the potato chips. I was really intrigued by how efficient an operation in an old warehouse that doesn't feature much high tech equipment. The potatos come trucked in fresh from the fields and they go through this incredible transformation to a potato chip (or cheeze curl or tortilla chip) in an under 5-10 minute operation. At various points on the tour our guide would stop and hand out some samples with the highlight a basketfull of thin potato chips still warm from being snagged off the line. You haven't lived my friends until you've had a fresh chip off the hoof.
I want to salute Golden Flake for staying local and making a go of it in such tough economic times. They've even found a way to partner up with Pace salsa to package and distribute salsa along with their own products. The potatoes go through this incredible washing cycle and the starch is captured and reprocessed at a different station which ends up being sold to companies for spray starch.
My only criticism of Golden Flake is the tremendous amount of cardboard boxes and plastic wrapping they go through. I saw literally thousands of brand new cardboard boxes waiting in their loading docks to be used to put the finished snack products in and then reams and reams of plastic wrap which went around the boxes. That's a lot of trees that died to repackage up the potato chips and the plastic wrap is made from petroleum, so another precious resource wasted.
You can go to the website and order some of their products and see an online tour for yourself.
Golden Flake