Crunch Time

A woman in London selects a jar of gherkins at her local grocery. At the same time, a guy takes a bite of a hot dog with pickle relish at a baseball game in New York. Each unwittingly is connected to Woodstock, Ill.

Throughout the world, every Claussen pickle you see or eat has passed through the company’s plant in Woodstock, just off Route 14.

Last year, the site produced 120 million pounds of its products, according to plant manager Gerry Lales. To meet such demand, the plant operates 24 hours a day year round, with two shifts for production and one shift for cleaning, employing 450 workers.

You could say––but not three times––they’re the only people who can manage to prep ‘em, pack ‘em and then pass ‘em on to the public at this perpetual pace.

Such wasn’t always the case.

Actually, Claussen didn’t even start as a pickling practice. In 1870, the Claussen family’s farm in Blue Island, Illinois was primarily interested in sauerkraut production––but it didn’t take long for the power of the pickle to prevail. The family watched their pickles become so popular that they soon decided to start a business on the southwest side of Chicago.

In 1970, Oscar Meyer purchased this business, and the rest, they say, is the stuff of lunch-treat legend. These days, the company has become a multifaceted operation owned by food giant and Oscar Meyer parent company Kraft, with 23 different types of products finding their way to grocery stores and restaurants virtually everywhere.

Among those products are six sizes of pickles, ranging in quarter-inch increments from under an inch to 2 1/4 inches in diameter. Then there are your pickle chips for hamburgers, your spears and your relish. Consider whether you want them in economy-size jars or standard, and if they will be used for food service or retail. Still there?

Then let’s just say the words garlic, dill, sweet or hearty garlic.

To your common connoisseur this might seem like enough––to be honest, probably more than enough.

But not so, at least for these pickle people.

“We’re always considering new products, “ Lales says, explaining that Kraft’s research and development office is responsible for discovering each of the flavor profiles and is constantly tracking trends and preferences.

Much of Claussen’s product growth has come since it moved from Chicago to Woodstock in 1976. The plant abandoned its former site because viaducts on streets surrounding the building made it difficult for trucks to enter; there was no room for expansion, and Chicago had passed an expensive head tax for businesses that also made staying prohibitive, Lales said. Woodstock became the center of operations because of its easy access to the expressways and the availability of suitable real estate for food production. The Woodstock site used to house a similar resident, the Borden cheese factory.

Location is critical to Claussen.

To meet America’s demand for dills, fresh produce has to arrive at the plant daily. From 6 to 10 a.m., a fleet of refrigerated trucks stop at Claussen’s door to deliver their wares.

Claussen “follows the sun” when selecting where to harvest, meaning they follow seasonal ripening patterns. From about Thanksgiving until Easter, the company will ship raw materials from Mexico and Honduras. From then until early June, it’s on to southern Texas and Florida, then into the Carolinas, north Texas and Alabama. About mid-July, the company moves into Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and California. In the fall, the company starts heading south again along the same paths.

Keeping the early-day deliveries on deadline is no easy feat. “One day I’d like to write a book about all of the excuses I’ve heard from drivers that get delayed,” Lales says. He describes one of the worst experiences––a time during the late 70s when routes 55 and 57 were closed––and about 30 Claussen-bound trucks couldn’t get out of downstate Effingham.  “You always have things coming up,” he says. “You’re constantly trying to adjust.”

Just don’t mention being cool as a cucumber around here. Lales bristles at the very mention of the c-word.

“That’s a common misperception,” Lales says, explaining that Claussen doesn’t use cucumbers. Instead, the company relies on a type of cucurbits, a cousin of the cucumber with smooth skin and large seed pockets. The cucurbits is a gourd similar to the zucchini, cantaloupe or water pumpkin. “If we allowed them to grow, they would turn round and yellow,” he says.

Once the shipments arrive, they are stored in a room kept at 32 degrees. Forklifts then carry the boxes to another room, so washing can begin.

It’s a race to keep everything fresh, as evidenced by the forklifts that honk their horns to announce their rights-of-way in the plant’s storage area, rather than waste a moment to slow.

“Step carefully,” he says of the drivers whizzing past. “The pickles have the right-of-way.”

He then leads down a hall, stops and pulls a rope hanging from the ceiling, and a metal door in front of him swishes open.

Here, in the cleaning room, he points out a large, water-filled tub with a rotating brush called a soaker tank. From gherkin to jumbo, each piece of “green stalk” will be soaked and washed. The bristles loosen any dirt or leaves that may have been picked up in the field.

Then it’s on to the runway. You won’t find super models slipping into sample dresses here ––though there’s a similarly compulsive obsession with size and fit.

On the runway, each pickle crosses a path with increasingly widening gaps. If a pickle is too short to make it, it falls through the cracks and lands on another conveyor.

Each conveyor then leads to another room where a specific product will be made that best suits each size. Even stubs serve a purpose, as they are made into relish.

In the packing area, row after row is filled with machines. They open box flaps to release jars, blow air into the inverted jars for cleaning and then add a “secret” spice. Such a monolithic manufacturing system practically screams for the appearance of an Oompa Loompa, but none can be found.

Pickles of fairly uniform shape, such as spears that are mechanically cut, can be added to jars by machine. However, many other products must be sorted and packed by hand.

After passing under a small waterfall of brine, each jar is scanned and weighed by machine to ensure the proper ratio of pickles-to-juice. An on-site lab also performs periodic testing to monitor how acidic the product is.

At times, the din of so many clinking jars can become maddening. The employees, all in rows, wear earplugs.

Some say that every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings; so surely, every time a jar clinks, you’re witnessing the passage of a cucurbits to pickledom.

Or maybe not.

After the product has been capped, the labeling process occurs. Aside from the Claussen seal, each jar features a freshness date and tamper-evident collar.

Then, the pickles are off to the storage room. Maintaining the proper environment during storage is crucial, Lales says. The air in the storage room must be kept dry so the cardboard doesn’t weaken, and the temperature must remain between 32 and 38 degrees to keep the pickles in proper condition.

Even the trucks that will take the pickle packages on to Kraft’s distribution centers and the grocery stores that stock them must maintain these temperature guidelines.

“If the temperature is too low, the pickles will freeze,” he says. When pickles freeze, their water-filled cells expand, and they lose their crunch. If the temperature is too high, a sugar-building process can begin turning them soft and mushy.

“That’s probably the single biggest obstacle we face, mishandling of the product,” Lales says.

It’s a complicated production and shipping process––keeping the pickles’ continued crunch—but it doesn’t faze Lales.

“It’s a fun business,” he says, “and a fun food.”