Flutterby™! : Amy's Kitchen

I'm going to write up something more, including a few pictures, but my mom's been visiting, our neighbor works at Amy's Kitchen and he'd offered a tour last time she was here, so yesterday we went up to take a tour of their Santa Rosa plant.

I've been reading a bunch of the local food stuff recently. We spend most of our time on the periphery of the store, and we eat very little processed food. I have toured processed food production lines in the past, and that's contributed to my "do it all at home" ethos. I've seen a number of recalls for soup and such that involve bits of metal because something fell into the choppers. We also read ingredients labels, and I'm prepared to be extremely cynical, so I was ready to come away from this thinking "there's an interesting set of industrial processes", and spend some time looking at their production lines trying to understand Larry's world a little bit.

However, I was pretty damned impressed. I'll go into detail later, but they run batch production on a set of repurposeable lines. They hand-chop chunks, use some awesome industrial strength food processors for grating and slicing, and the cooking and assembly is set up such that it really is all processes that you'd do in your own kitchen, except maybe for the jar and can filling, which run from the cooking kettles into pistons that accurately measure and fill the jars, but even there the jars get filled, the tops get put on, and they're transferred to canning cookers that are clearly related to the processes I use in my own kitchen.

And I'm now inspired to make my own tofu!

It didn't automatically turn me from being a "cook it myself" person, but I was quite impressed, both that the processes of Amy's Kitchen really are just scaled up versions of what I'd do in my own kitchen, and that the work environment was pretty friendly and happy; there's a good sense of people enjoying the place and happy to be there, and I think that's got to translate into attention to detail.

Despite my general aversion to processed foods, we do have a bunch of canned stuff we use anyway for disaster preparedness, and I'm now okay with adding Amy's canned soups and such to that stash, and we'll also occasionally buy frozen convenience foods, for that "too lazy to cook tonight" time, and I feel pretty good about Amy's there too.

Which surprised me.

Full disclosure: We got a few coupons for free products at the end of our visit, and our neighbors who work there are good folks.