I met a man this week who worked for years at the Nestlés chocolate factory in Fulton, NY. He started as a laborer in the “Liquor and Flavor” department right out of high school. Over the years he worked his way up to inspector in the same department. He was happy there and was good at his job. Then in 2003, Nestlés closed the plant.
In the world of chocolate, “liquor” is 100% cacao. It's the starting point for all chocolate products. To make liquor, the seed pod of the cocoa tree is harvested from plantations in the tropics. Each pod contains from 20 to 50 seeds. It takes about 400 seeds to make a pound of finished chocolate. After harvest, the fresh seeds are fermented for three to nine days to develop flavor, then the beans are dried for about a week. Dried beans are shipped to a factory where they are roasted for 30 minutes to two hours at high temperature, then the outer shells are cracked and removed. The kernel of pure chocolate that remains is called a “nib.” Some high end manufacturers further roast the nib to achieve a darker color and flavor. The nibs are then milled and pressed to liquify the cocoa butter and produce chocolate liquor (also called unsweetened). The remaining solid, “cocoa cake” is ground to make cocoa powders. Chocolate liquor is blended with sugar, butter, milk and other ingredients to produce the various types of chocolate: semi-sweet, bittersweet, milk chocolate, etc. Here is a good definition of each type: http://www.ghirardelli.com/chocopedia/varieties.aspx
At Nestlés in Fulton, chocolate liquor and many other ingredients arrived at the factory by rail and truck. The first part of the manufacturing process was “Liquor and Flavor” where the fellow I met worked. Here the raw materials were blended to make a paste. Chocolate refiners, a set of big rollers, crushed the paste into tiny flakes that determine the smoothness of the final product. The result is poured into giant vats (called a conch) to be heated and “conched.” Each batch of chocolate is constantly stirred for hours or even days. Conching reduces moisture, drives off any lingering acidic flavors, and coats each miniscule solid particle of chocolate with a layer of cocoa butter. Finally, the finished chocolate undergoes tempering, a heating and cooling process, that stabilizes the product. http://www.ghirardelli.com/chocopedia/making_manufacturing.aspx
As an inspector in liquor and flavor my informant used to test batches being conched for proper viscosity. He would scoop a sample out with a spatula and spread it on a glass plate. The number of thick lines that formed on the plate was used to determine moisture content. He would also test individual chocolate batches in a lab to be sure the percentages of the mixtures were right. He told me that the amount of flavoring was generally determined by weighing. For example, if vanilla needed to be added, large buckets of extract would be precisely weighted before being dumped into the mixture.
The Fulton plant is shuttered and empty now. Nestlés decided it was obsolete after over 100 years of production. The Swiss food giant opened its very first American factory here in 1899. When it closed, the last 467 employees had no other local place to work. All but one of the other factories in town, including a giant, nearly new, Miller Brewing plant, had already closed. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/02/nyregion/when-the-chocolate-melted-nestle-factory-closing-leaves-town-reeling.html?pagewanted=all My informant had to drive 35 miles to Syracuse every day to work making concrete blocks. He was back to working as an “unskilled” laborer at age 45.
Standing in front of the bank of abandoned loading docks last weekend vividly reminded me of another hot summer day back in the mid-1990s when Merry and I and friends toured the plant on what turned out to be the last open house factory tour. Even outside the giant plant the air was saturated with chocolate. Inside the oldest section of the plant every piece of woodwork had absorbed so much cocoa butter from the air that the wood was dark and oily. Signs warned the steps to the second level might be slippery.
Upstairs we marveled at the completely automated chocolate morsel machine. At one end a plate with a hundred or more tiny nozzles dipped to almost touch a wide moving conveyer. When the plate rose it left behind a hundred perfectly formed warm chocolate chips. The plate rose and fell about once every ten seconds. Thousands of small bits marched down the line passing through one giant refrigerator after another, each a few degrees cooler. The entire apparatus was at least a block long. At the far end the conveyer passed under a sharp edge freeing the morsels. Inertia carried them into a huge funnel. An endless river of cold chocolate chips poured through the floor around the clock to be bagged downstairs. Millions of chocolate chip cookies would be made with those morsels.
The entire place was spotless. The employees we encountered obviously took great pride in their work. This was the home of Toll House® chocolate chips. This was the birth place of the Crunch® candy bar way back in 1938. Now it's empty, another victim of mega-corporate efficiency. Before they decided to close it, here's what Nestlés had to say about the proud history of their Fulton operation.
The little town of Fulton looks pretty ragged these days. Its largely working class population commutes or left town forever. This is the story of faceless capitalism all over America. I'm powerless to do anything about it. It makes me sad.
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