A Cary bakery is one of two places in the country to produce the popular Cheez-It crackers.
Kellanova’s 500,000 square foot factory has more than 700 employees. WRAL got a chance to tour the facility on Friday.
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The bakery produces 14.5 million Cheez-It crackers an hour and 16 million individual sandwich crackers each day. In one year, they make enough Cheez-It crackers to reach the moon and back three times.
To simplify the process, there are six major steps when it comes to making the perfect cracker:
1. It starts from local wheat in North Carolina. So many crackers are produced that 15% of all of North Carolina’s wheat production goes into making these tiny orange squares. That wheat is delivered to the facility through 14 trucks a day.
2. Once the wheat reaches the plant, the dough is mixed in with real cheese.
3. After the dough is ready it is sent to the processing rollers.
4. Dough goes into a giant oven the size of a football field - 300 feet.
5. It comes out of the oven and goes through various packaging and then palletizing.
6. It’s now ready to be shipped to a distribution center.
After investing more than $200 million over the last few years and utilizing technology like newer ovens and digitizing this process, the plant has become increasingly more efficient according to operations manager Paul Turner.
“It’s a big difference from then to now. The fact that we can make real time decisions out there on the floor has changed it tremendously,” he said.
Turner said the biggest improvement is that they don’t have much waste because now they can fix any problems as it’s happening.
Human resources manager Tonya Gaskin has been with the company 37 years. She said what has kept her there is the growth.
“They used to take a knife and put on the peanut butter and cheese,” she said.
Gaskin said since then everything has changed now that the factory is mostly automated with robots and digital screens.
Even the crackers themselves have seen innovation. The Extra Toasty Cheez-Its didn’t always exist.
“It came about accidentally. Our consumers told us they like the burnt ones, so that’s become one of our top brands now,” said Plant Director Steve Surovec.
Beyond the product, the company has a strong focus on diversity and inclusion.
“We have 700 people here from over 50 countries as first time Americans. Very proud team to be on. We’re all proud to be Americans together cause we’re all immigrants, and we’re all proud of the success we share together,” Surovec said.
He says when you have a brand like Cheez-It, it makes it even better because people know and love Cheez-It, and they get to be a part of that.
The other Cheez-It bakery is in Kansas City.