SMALL TALK: A look at the success inside Herr’s potato chip factory

I could enjoy watching other people work all day long — at least if I’m not working alongside them.

That might be one reason why I’m fascinated with factory tours.

Repetition leads to extreme competency. Workers quickly get good at performing tasks.

A factory worker, mailman, crossing guard or even a politician learns on the job. Watching a practiced professional athlete is a joy, just as is viewing a skilled employee smoothly and effortlessly pack a box of pretzels for the thousandth time that day.

Four or five times, I’ve taken the free tour at the Herr's Snack Factory in Nottingham. Fifteen hundred employees work at Herr's. They make and store 340 different individual items in a 400,000-square-foot area. The website calls this the tastiest tour in town.

I also have visited and collected free samples on factory tours at plants for Yuengling, Harley Davidson, Marlboro, Venetian glass, Ben and Jerry's, Jim Beam and the Philadelphia U.S. Mint (where no free samples are given away).

The free samples at Herr's Snacks are delightful. As the house-sized machines in strip-mall-sized structures whirled, shook and rattled all around us, my favorite part of the Herr's tour is snacking on hot chips straight off the line that six minutes earlier were potatoes in the basement.

The enormity, size and scope of large factories is impressive. Herr's can cook up to 500,000 pounds of potatoes daily. The spuds arrive in 50,000 loads on up to 9 or 10 trucks per day.

When on the tour it isn't hard to imagine that hundreds, or maybe even thousands of people, in all 50 states and 48 countries where Herr's distributes might be eating at any time goods produced at the plant in Nottingham.

Herr's is a good steward of the environment. Much of the "drops" and by-products produced are fed to about 600 Angus cattle at the Herr farm. Wheat, soybean, corn and barley are also grown by Herr's. And the shipping boxes are handled gently and reused several times.

No factory tour is complete without hearing about the company's origins.

Jim Herr borrowed $1,750 to buy an existing potato chip business in 1946. With his wife Mim, he rebuilt after a devastating 1951 fire destroyed the plant.

I don't know if I would have cashed the insurance check and instead worked at something else and collected a regular paycheck, but Jim and Mim Herr decided to rebuild.

While Jim Herr gambled big, he was also an innovator. My favorite variety, sour cream and onion chips were not yet produced and Herr's had not started using the more expensive foil packing to help preserve the product longer.

It took the couple three years to pay off the original $1,750 loan. It seems so easy to win at blackjack when you’re up a hundred dollars, while conversely, Jim Herr started a fledgling business far in the hole.

Looking around that Nottingham factory, everything is fine-tuned and runs seemingly effortlessly and oh so smoothly. There's the hum of precision and the smell of chips and money.

After the fact, it seems so easy and obvious. Why didn't we all just go out and start a major business as Jim Herr did?

Big risk can translate into big gain, or devastating losses.

Herr picked the right business in a growing America where soldiers were coming home, starting families and eating more snack foods. Herr also helped create that market.

We can't all be Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. It certainly must help to be brilliant to make the big bucks, but there also has to be that drive and ability to take a calculated risk.

Herr overcame many obstacles. He cleared many roadblocks. He dusted himself off after losses and then expanded plant infrastructure. Like a factory worker, he practiced and fine-tuned his business model, machinery and marketing.

And, he did it repeatedly –over and over and over again.

Bill Rettew Jr. is a columnist for the Daily Local News. As he wrote this column, he enjoyed a tasty bag of Herr's Hot Sauce Flavored Potato Chips for breakfast. He may be contacted at [email protected].

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