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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
To the left are the star attractions: two Peeps-related assembly lines. One makes nothing but the classic chick-shaped Peeps. Although they're only sold during the Easter season, they're produced throughout the entire year; a Peep's shelf life is 24 months. The second assembly line creates the company's other marshmallow products: Bunnies, creamy Easter eggs, Halloween ghosts and cats, Christmas trees and snowmen and Valentine's Day hearts. Workers in hairnets and lab coats bustle around each line.
The first things that catch my eye are the huge containers pouring colored sugar onto each line's conveyor belt. Right now the first line is making yellow Peeps, while the second line is creating lavender Bunnies. Yellow is the most popular color for Peeps and Bunnies, but in the wilds of your local drugstore you'll also find lavender, pink, blue and white variations. The albino Peeps are the rarest, though Kerr says they still account for 4 percent of sales. "Chefs like them," he says. I imagine a pair of pristine white Peeps perched atop someone's wedding cake.
A closer look at the Peeps assembly line reveals a fascinating process. The liquefied marshmallow mix, produced on-site with sugar, corn syrup, gelatin and potassium sorbate, is aerated in a vat and pumped into a machine. About once a second, it undulates in an S-like motion and squeezes out six groups of five Peeps. They're perfectly formed from beak to tail -- except for the fact that each Peep in a group of five is joined to its neighbor. Siamese quintuplets, if you will.
The 30 Peeps -- at this point just quivering, chick-shaped masses of white marshmallow -- land on the sugar-coated conveyer belt and roll upward to a covered area. Inside, a tiny, perpetual tornado picks up the colored sugar from the belt and sprays it around. When the Peeps emerge, they're totally covered. A bit further up the line, a photo-sensor machine triggers the mechanism that adds eyes made of little drops of carnauba wax.
Even with their new eyes, though, the Peeps can't see what's happening to them. This is because they're traveling backward up the line. "Rose jokes that we do that so they don't get nervous and try to make a break for it," Kerr says.
Indeed, it's for the best that the Peeps don't know what's next. The conveyor belt drops each of the six sets of Peeps onto a separate smaller belt that leads to the packaging area. Winding down from the ceiling are transparent pneumatic tubes filled with boxes. Each tube regularly spits out boxes at the belt level, catching a group of five Peeps as it drops from one segment to the next. The timing is exquisite: shwoomp, shwoomp, shwoomp. I could watch it for days.
Kerr breaks the spell by grabbing a box and offering a just-born Peep, which is delectably warm and smooth. "You'll never get them quite as fresh as this," he says. He's right.
Next, the boxes of Peeps travel down to a cellophane-sealing area, where they're automatically packaged and dropped into cartons. The entire production time of each Peep, from the marshmallow-squirting machine to the sealer, takes less than seven minutes. Up to 2 million Peeps can be made per day. This is fortunate, because the company anticipates this spring's sales of its Easter products -- the Peeps, the Bunnies and the new marshmallow eggs -- will top 600 million.
The second production line, which runs parallel to the Peeps line, requires a bit more human labor. Because it makes different shapes at different times of the year, the process can't be quite as mechanized. As sugarcoated Bunnies wind their way to the packaging area, employees scoop up groups of four and nimbly fit them in boxes, which then roll down to the sealing machine. The workers laugh and elbow one another as they gather Bunnies. I'm awed by their speed and dexterity. If I were involved, there'd be definite rabbit carnage.
A bit later, we leave the factory and are joined in a nearby conference room by Greg Barratt, the company's V.P. for marketing and sales. The room is festooned with Just Born products and Peep crafts. A child's Easter bonnet sports four Peeps, and more nestle in a small tree branch. This is a company that recognizes that people do more with their products than eat them.
