[blackdog]

Private label food manufacturers manage most production that way. It keeps the costs down by avoiding dedicated production lines, staff, machinery, and maintenance. I used to maintain pouch filling machine lines for oatmeal, hot cocoa, grits, etc.....that ran at 1,100 pouches per minute on radial volumetric fillers. That's 110 cartons a minute. One case every 12 seconds thru the casepacker. One full pallet every three minutes.

Crazy fast. Crazy efficient process control.

Those Smuckers jelly cups, syrup cups, Crystal light cups, and pixie stix you pour into bottled water. All insanely profitable and made at such high speeds you need computer controlled cameras and screens just to see a process played back to you at slow enough speed, so you can make adjustments without blowing the machines up in a crashing train wreck.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

My college summer job was being a mechanical engineering intern at Continental Can’s flexible packaging plant in Paoli, PA. The whole process of making custom printed paper and lined paper bags was amazing like that. The enormous rolls of paper, the unwinders, the flying splices when one roll was exhausted and a new roll moved into position! The machines that folded the paper bags which was a one-bag-at-a-time process. Wow. All for something as prosaic as a paper bag.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Dairy was my game for a number of years and the way we could take tankers of raw milk from a slew of farms and turn it into a bunch of standardized products was a marvel to behold.

You can not put a nutrition label on something unless you know exactly what is in it.

Every gallon of milk with the exact amount of butterfat.

Every tub of cottage cheese with the same amount of dressing.

Yeah there were the occasional mistake but considering the amount of stuff we turned out the mistakes were microscopic. And yes, just as Lays did here, we over reacted to all mistakes. No one wants to be the next Bil-Mar Foods.

What I don't understand is how the food got out of the factory with anyone noticing the error.