Just in Time in the Pickle Plant

Here is a "Just in Time" story from a colleague's father.

In the summer of 1951, I worked 13 hours per day, 6 days per week at the Heinz Pickle Factory in Holland, Michigan. At that time it was the largest pickle factory in the nation. I was hired as a college student for the Green Season. This was the time of the year when fresh pickles were brought in from the fields to be directly canned rather than brined in large tubs. The fresh pickles were picked on the farms, transported to the factory by a chain of semi's piled high with green fruit, sorted and the packed in glass jars for processing.

One of my jobs was to monitor the operation of the merging of the four pickle packing lines. The green pickles were packed symmetrically by hand into jars. The filled jars on the lines were merged at a large rotating table. The jars pealed-off, linearly, from the periphery of table to go into the cooking oven. Occasionally the oven would stall but the packing lines kept producing jars stuffed with pickles. My job was to detect when the oven had stalled and then, using a crowbar, smash jars until the oven was again accepting them.

Obviously the management had decided that it was less expensive to smash already packed jars than to stop the pickle supply chain that extended miles into the sandy fields of Southern Michigan. The pickle pickers kept picking. The semi's kept coming. The packers kept packing. There was no warehouse for fresh pickles. It was a just in time operation.