This Is How Canned Food Is Made!

One of the client visits I had was to a canned food manufacturing company in Austin, Indiana. They make canned soups, beans, and such for grocery chain house labels, including Wal-Mart, Kroger, Piggly Wiggly. After the bidness part of the day was over, they offered us a tour of the plant. Heck yeah! I live for this stuff. Have any of you watched the PCN network? Where they take tours of different manufacturing plants in Pennsylvania? It's like the greatest channel ever. I've watched tons of random stuff being made. I love seeing how things get to where they get to. It's the enginerd in me, I guess.
Empty cans, yo. These are made in Canada and shipped down.
Look at all these raw ingredients. Those are probably beans. Billions and billions of beans.
See these giant vats? They're full of boiling water. Please, do NOT fall into one of these!
And what do those vats of water do? Why, they wash and soak the beans.
After the cans are filled with the beans, they get lids put on. And yes, they do go round and round in lines up in the sky!
Did you know that beans and soups and canned goods in general, that everything is cooked while in the can? These are the cookers. These are brand spankin new and haven't even been used yet. You have no idea how impressed I was with this kind of machinery.
And here are the filled cans! Rows and rows of them!
They get labelled...
Then packed up...
Shrink wrapped...And then stored until shipping. They even have kosher cans! Once a month, they clean out all the equipment, get their rabbi to come down, and with his blessing they do some kosher runs. This was one of the things I've ever seen in my life. I love to see stuff like this in action!