Tomato Sauce
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One of the more colourful factories I visited during my days as a management consultant was a tomato sauce factory on a wondrous scale. It was in Hungary and supplied tomato sauce to the entire Communist Bloc. Every day five huge articulated juggernaut tipper-trailers would arrive and tons of tomatoes would be tipped from each into the storage silos. They were then mashed up and squirted around the factory through gargantuan pipes suspended at high level above the machinery.
The product flowed to cookers, ovens, emulsifiers and to have the magic ingredient added that stops the thixotropic tomato sauce shaking out of your bottle. A thixotropic fluid is one which takes a finite time to attain equilibrium viscosity when introduced to a step change in shear rate. Some thixotropic fluids return to a gel state almost instantly, such as ketchup. I don't want to blind you with the technicalities of tomato sauce, but I do want to tell you about flanges and pumps.
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The factory had been built in 1947 and was showing signs of lack of maintenance. When tomato sauce is being pumped around a factory, there will inevitably be a leak here and there. The trouble is, tomato sauce when dropped from overhead pipework onto the floor of a dark, dingy factory at the feet of workers who've seen it day in and day out, stays on the floor.
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They were used to it, but until you are familiar with the sight, the first impression was that an assassin has just done away with a party member who hadn't voted for Yeltsin. Blood, gore and the smell of rotting tomatoes was not the happiest environment for the implementation of food hygiene standards that met EEC regulations.
You think I'm joking?
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They were just beginning to get the hang of the idea of maintaining production records, so that they could get the 'sell-by' date right on the label. I was therefore a bit surprised to see that a week's production all had the main front label neatly printed and marked 17thAugust.
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'How can this huge batch which looks like a week's production have all been made on 17thAugust?' I asked.
The production manager replied: 'Ne hülyéskedj Augusztus 17 a szüreti idÅ‘pont'
I asked him to write it down, and later I had it translated from Hungarian:
'Don't be silly. 17thAugust is the harvest date'
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The tomato sauce bottles had a metal closure, with the usual dimple that clicks when you first open it, showing it had been properly sealed. So at some stage in the packing process, someone had to check the seals were OK. Bear in mind that these bottles were travelling fast and being stacked into crates and on to pallets. I asked to be shown the check, and there, sure enough was a man with a light hammer who tapped each lid as the bottles cruised past and listened for the 'wrong' tone. I watched for a full five minutes and noticed that when someone else walked past, he'd politely stand aside and miss the next couple of dozen bottles which were in the packing cases and on the van before he'd looked round.
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These were the sort of things we had to correct. In the end everything is achievable but you do have to win the support of the workforce who see little point in change. But now, when you see a bottle of sauce with Hungary marked as the county of origin, you should feel assured the management structure was put in place in the 1980s and will by now be well established.
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