Chicago. The city that eats. And eats and eats and. . .
well, you get the point. We're the home of a summer festival strictly devoted to the fine art of gorging, gluttony and the bloat. Oh yeah, we love our food. And a lot of the food that goes down so well is made and manufactured right here, on Windy City soil. From confectionery delights to essential condiments to Manwich-sized meals. We thought we'd take a peek behind the proverbial curtain, for a look at the food factories that turn out the delectable delights that make Chicago's mouth water.
But traveling to the Epicurean emerald city wasn't as easy as we thought. While a rare few food factories offer "official" tours, open to the public, more often than not, the companies are locked up Fort Knox-style, with a big "Go Away" sign hanging on the front door. A Keebler elf told us to fuck off. Blommer Chocolate said forget it. Brach's blew us off. Jays had a chip on their shoulder, inviting us, then turning us away. Even Hormel Chili, just across the Wisconsin Border in Beloit, had a cayenne pepper up its ass. Fearing some sort of Upton Sinclair "Jungle" scenario, plenty o' food plants apparently had something to hide. But still, there were those that opened the doors to the magic kingdom and said "Come on in."
Gonnella Bread
Admit it: deep down, you've always known that those big, delicious loaves of bread you get in restaurantsÑcrunchy on the outside and soft and warm withinÑaren't really made in the kitchen by elderly Italian ladies with their sleeves rolled up, slaving over a hot oven to get it just right. If you need something to drive home the truth, try visiting Gonnella Baking Company's Near North baking facility: Bread, like cars, TVs and most every other luxury we enjoy, owes its existence to the good old-fashioned Ford assembly line. You may have to make some special arrangements to check out the factory, as group tours are no longer offered. "Yeah, unfortunately we don't do that anymore," the plant manager says apologetically. "Someone had a little accident, and they came after us." One shudders, imagining some poor kid falling, "Willy Wonka"-style, into a tub of dough.
Opened in 1965, the plant on Chicago Avenue is the company's primary bake site, averaging approximately 50,000 loaves of bread per day. That's 300,000 pounds of flour, transformed into breads of every kind, from honey wheat to marble rye, and with a minimum of wasteÑmisshapen loaves, or "cripples" as they're unfortunately known in the business, are sent to the plant at Erie and Damen to be turned into bread crumbs.
On the factory floor, Bob Gonnella Jr., one of thirty-five or so descendants or in-laws of the alpha Gonnella who started the company in 1886, has to holler to be heard above the rattle and clang of the enormous flour mixer, the processors that shape homely lumps of dough into palatable loaves and the ovens. (Bread destined for restaurant consumption, by the way, isn't fully baked, but left with a half-hour or so to go, so that it arrives at your table with that satisfying oven-fresh mystique). Most of the small staff seem to be men, with mustaches and tired eyes, efficient and cheerless. These aren't bakers so much as mechanics, factory guys with union cards and hairnets, there to ensure that the machines are operating smoothly and to make those few remaining adjustments for which human hands are still required.
Up a winding back staircase, the second floor is where Gonnella makes "strings" of dough, for breadsticks, buns and other non-loaf-oriented breadstuffs. Here, huge, rolling waves of dough are fed into an enormous funnel, emerging transformed by the machines into a multiplicity of little bread-snakes, each carefully calibrated in length for proper baking.
The last stop on our tour is the loading area, where, Gonnella explains, the bread piles up all day long as it emerges from the ovens, finally stuffing the room full to bursting before the trucks show up to take it all away. The room is lined with a series of garage doors, each labeled with a sign indicating which route's bread should be left there for pick up, sort of like when little kids have to wait under a number to make sure they don't get on the wrong bus.
Vienna Beef
Yet another hairnet is mandatory for a look-see of the Vienna Sausage Manufacturing Company on the corner of Chicago's most dangerous intersectionÑDamen, Fullerton and Elston. A laboratory jacket is also standard issue when walking into the cavernous factory that remains a chilly 40 degrees Fahrenheit year round. As with most area food factories, the 105-year-old Vienna Company is not open to the public. Even still, corporate weenies are more than willing to open the doors when asked.
"You're not going to find any hot dog horror stories here," says Vienna Marketing Manager, Dan Gbur. "No brains, no tongues."
Once inside the Vienna plant, you'd better watch where you step, however. Spongy, fatty scraps lay scattered about, as employees sweep them up with big dust brooms. Don't fret, however; all the tossed trimmings are disposed of and not, we repeat, not squeezed into sausage casing.
A waft of savory hickory hangs in the air at Vienna, compliments of the smoke rooms that use real hardwood hickory chips to flavor the meatÑa process, according to Gbur, that has become rare in the business. In total, there are 2,000 Vienna Beef hot dog vendors in ChicagoÑmore than all the Burger Kings, Wendys and McDonald's combined. Vienna pumps out fifteen million hot dogs a year at their North Side plant, all boasting Vienna's trademark "snap," the sound the dog makes when biting into it.
"That comes from the cooking process as well as the fact that we use lean beef," says Gbur.
Vienna claims to have invented the Chicago-style hot dog: the pure beef frankfurter buried in a steaming yellow bun and smothered in mustard, bright green relish, diced onion, tomatoes, a wedge or two of pickles and a dash of celery salt. Today, the company has diversified, pumping out soups and corn dogs, corned beef and pastrami. But without question, it is the beef frank that is the company's trademark. Next time you're at a hot dog cart in Tokyo, you can be sure that that pure Beef Vienna dog was made right in Chicago.
Jelly Belly
Goelitz Confection, which, in addition to its flagship facility here in North Chicago, has a plant in California and one under construction in Wisconsin, makes all sorts of candyÑfrom wiggly worms to candy corn. But make no mistake: Goelitz is the house that Mr. Jelly Belly built. The cheerful red character with the chef's hat and white gloves waves down from a flag hanging just below the Stars and Stripes outside the factory, and inside are the machines used to lovingly craft the "gourmet" jelly bean in all of its tempting varieties. The Jelly Belly factory tour begins with a video, in which the unflappably upbeat Mr. Jelly Belly describes his journey of self-actuation. In cheerful voice-over, he reminisces about his humble beginnings as an unformed, pasty slurry, until he was coated with a hard shell and emerged into the world as a fully realized piece of candyÑcomplete with "Jelly Belly" written upon his flank in tiny white letters. In the end, he would be sorted, bagged and trucked out along with 50,000 pounds worth of his brothers and sisters.
Our first stop is a room full of what appear to be enormous beauty parlor hair dryers or sci-fi laundry machines, but are actually the huge steel cylinders where the jelly beans are shined with a sort of edible wax to achieve their handsome sheen.
Onward, then, to an enormous room filled with twenty million jelly beans of every flavor, stacked in crate upon crate. (A map of the room hangs on the wall by the entrance, so if someone should need to find the Top Bananas or Very Cherries in a hurry, there is a guide at hand.) Like nervous Army recruits, through with boot camp but unsure where they'll be posted, these beans are finished products, but have yet to be tagged and sorted for distribution.
Which is the function of the last room of the tour, a Rube Goldberg wet dream crowded with long conveyer belts, weighing machines and complicated contraptions of every sort, all designed to get the proper amount of Jelly Bellys, and the appropriate flavor distribution, into each bag. Also present are a couple of real people, who administer to an enormous trough full of candy, first tossing in boxes full of new jelly beans and then reaching in to mix them all together, creating the multi-hued harmony the modern consumer expects in his confections.
Incidentally, all those Jelly Bellys that are found to be deficientÑmalformed or stuck accidentally to a fellow beanÑare referred to as "Belly Flops" and can be purchased at the gift shop for cheap.
Morton Salt
What would food be without condiments? A dash of salt adds a salivating kick to just about anything, and the granddaddy of sodium compound factories is headquartered in Chi-town. For 151 years, Morton Salt has produced table salt and water softener salt and road salt; in 1928, the Elston Avenue plant was constructed just north of Division. While the company has many plants sprinkled across the United States, Morton still calls Chicago home.
Trekking inside, there is, no surprise, salt everywhere. It's on the soles of shoes, layered across machinery, strewn across floors. Walking into the main warehouse, two massive piles of salt tower upwards. A chute in the ceiling belches out still more salt from a conveyor belt that connects out to barges floating on the nearby Chicago River. Salt is transported up the Mississippi River from a Louisiana mine. Most of the salt packaged in Chicago is used for water conditioning, but even so, wooden flats are everywhere, holding salt ready for your shaker. The plant's fifteen employees (Morton adds another eighteen part-time workers in the winter due to demand for road salt) work tirelessly to package up the white stuff. But this poses one big problem: salt is mighty corrosive and it's all over the place. Stainless steel machinery is essential.
Finally, a trek through the plant lays to rest the mystery of the Morton motto "When It Rains, It Pours."
As a Morton PR man points out, "Even in extreme conditions, humidity or a long shelf life, it remains free flowing."
Here's another moniker for Morton to ponder: "So what if it hardens your arteries, pass the shaker!"
Ah, food. Marvelous food.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.