Where All Those Pears Come From
Posted on June 22, 2009
Filed Under Museums & tours | Leave a Comment
Posted by Sierra
Raise your hand if you’ve ever gotten anything from Harry & David, be it online, as a gift, or from one of their stores. It may have been Moose Munch, Royal Riviera pears, Bing cherries, or a gift box with an assortment of goodies. We went to the flagship store in Medford, Oregon. There you can take a tour of the bakery and the packing plant for $5 (you also get a coupon that is good for $5 off a purchase of more than $35). At the end, you get free samples (more on that later)!
The first stop on our tour was the bakery, where you can see Moose Munch being made (the photo above). Some 8,000 pounds of Moose Munch are made per hour! You can tell what each worker does based on their hairnet/gloves. A green hairnet means you’re a supervisor, a blue hairnet means you’re a line leader, a yellow hairnet means you speak Spanish and English, and any other colors mean you’re just a worker. Also, purple gloves mean you work in a high-allergen environment and should be careful not to contaminate anything. Also in the bakery are Swedish ovens, which rotate the baking goods. Two giant vats can hold about 6,000 pounds of chocolate apiece. Then come the free samples. You get a cookie and a chocolate. The chocolate was good, but the cookie had jam in it. I hate jam. But Mom and Dad were happy to eat mine.
Next on the tour, you go to the packing plant. On the way there, you pass the orchards, where they grow 800 pounds of peaches and 19,000 tons of pears a year. At harvest time, it takes 400 workers 6 weeks to get all the pears off the trees!
You can see people packing fruits and other treats into baskets and boxes. The experienced packers can pack 300-400 boxes a day!
Finally, at the end of the tour, you end up back in the store. I recommend buying lots of Moose Munch. The chocolate kind is yummy, but (in my opinion) the fat-free toffee kind is even better. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go sneak some. Don’t tell Mom!
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