Yesterday we took a field trip to Franz’s bakery.  It was actually really cool.  

Health and Safety required that we all wear head coverings.  I was not even allowed to wear my wedding ring in!  You can tell Reagan is thrilled to be wearing such a cool hat.  But I can’t blame him.  I made sure no one got a picture of me in my hairnet.

Better than your Bosch

The cooling rack.
Heaven or Carb Death, depending on which camp you’re in.

Headed to the bagging area.

This amazing machine blew the bread bag up with air and then swooshed the bread right into it.  And yes, for those who are wondering, that is a real word.  From the online dictionary: 
v. swooshed, swoosh·ing, swoosh·es
1. To move with or make a rushing sound.
2. To flow or swirl copiously.
To cause to move with or make a rushing or swirling sound.

Then this machine date stamped it and twisty tied it.  Lots of fun to watch.

Fascinating Facts from Franz:
-Just before the bagging process the bread goes through a metal detector so strong it can detect tiny pieces of plastic or anything else that might have gotten in the bread.

-This Franz bakery also makes the Great Value brand bread for Walmart and the Hytop brand for Winco.  And they are different recipes.

-They make 40 loaves of bread per minute at this factory, but that’s nothing.  This factory may be the biggest in Idaho, but it is the smallest of all the Franz bakeries in the country.  In Portland they have a bakery that can turn out 240 loaves of bread per minute and there are only 6 people working in the plant! 

-When Reagan asked them what they did with all the reject bread that we saw around the plant and in these barrels:

We learned that they sell it to farmers for their animals,  they give a lot of it to the needy at food shelters, and anything that is bagged but past it’s sell by date, they sell to pig farmers.  Apparently pig farmers call the mold ‘green frosting’ for their piggies and it doesn’t hurt them to eat it. 
Good news is, none of the bread goes to waste.

At the end of the our tour they let the kids devour several loaves of cinnamon bread and everyone got their own bag of Liberty’s favorite kind of cookies!

So we made it a picnic!