Company Visits

May 14, 2013

Today we had the last three company visits.  We went to a brush company called Hela, a canning factory calles Centauros, and a Mushroom factory called Bosques del Mauco. 

At Hela we were on the production floor and saw several different kinds of brushes being made. I was surprised that the process was not nearly as automated as I expected.  Every machine needed people running it and feeding the materials into it.  I thought that the production line would be less reliant on human labor, but at every stage, people are extremely necessary.

At Centauros we saw where the production happens, but the factory was not running at this time of year.  In the summer, the factory is full of fruit, and all of the production lines are active with fruit canning.  While we were there, we saw ketchup being made, and Italian sauce being packaged.  Both of these products were made with a store brand label for a local supermarket.  I had never thought about where store-brand products came from before, but I guess now I know.

Bosques is a mushroom factory that produces it’s own compost.  Because of this, the entire place reeked of manure.  The smell was terrible, and giant piles of compost filled the yard, steaming, making the smell inescapable.  Once we got inside, however, the smell receded enough that it wasn’t unbearable.  It was replaced by the smell of humidity and mushrooms.  That smell isn’t exactly my favorite, but it was better than the compost.  We got to see the rooms where the mushrooms were grown and picked, as well as the packaging station.  I was surprised, once again, at the lack of automation in the company.  Each mushroom was picked by hand and packaged individually, and the process seemed really inefficient.

The company visits were informative, but all we wanted to do by the end was go back to the hotel and wash off the smell of manure.