Girl Scout Cookies Factory Tour

Today we took the tour of a local girl scout cookie factory (Snax-R-Us). It was most interesting.

We entered via the loading dock. Here large crates of raw materials (RM) are unloaded from semi-trailers; I understand they are shipped cross- country from New Jersey in hopper cars to the local distributor. These crates are moved by robotic cranes to be dumped into the RM hoppers under a JIT system (the raw stuff has to be fresh).

The hopper drops 1 girl scout onto the cookie line every .25 seconds (this is the newest, high-speed system). The drop and resultant roll- and-acceleration renders the RM unconscious, a very cheap anesthetic to prevent harassment by the SPCGS. The girls then go through sizing sieves, which drop them onto other high speed lines. They then are run through compacters, which compress each scout into 1 (one (uno)) cookie shape of the type currently being made. They are then coated, dipped, covered, smothered, and/or filled as appropriate.

Each cookie therefore contains everything necessary to sustain one (1 (uno)) adult vampire, werewolf, or football player for approximately siente (seven (7)) days, in a delicious, sweet, often chocolated form.

The lines then carry the cookie through the steam-cleaners, pressers, ovens, glazers, resizers, QA, secondary packaging, QA, primary packaging, QA, crating, and back to the loading docks, all in a matter of 2 minutes (minutos) and 37.002 segundos (seconds).

We also got to go through the line ourselves, which was quite a trip. A couple of folks got lost when packaging couldn't find them to pull them out, but they were just politicians, so the trip was even better than expected.

Highly recommended.

-Echo, a Girl Scout Sandwich cookie


AUTHOR's NOTE: I wrote this long before the Addams Family movie came out.

Last updated: 6 May 1994

Copyright 1989, 1994 Miles O'Neal, Austin, TX. All rights reserved.

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