For a city of 15,000 people nestled in the heart of rural McHenry County, Woodstock boasts an impressive lineup of attractions. There`s an old historic courthouse, a musical theater company, an Elks Lodge, plus a traditional Victorian Christmas celebration in the town square.
Oh yes, and a huge pickle-packing plant.
That`s right. Woodstock can lay claim to having the only Claussen Pickle Company plant in the world.
It`s in this modern steel and concrete plant, nestled at the end of Claussen Drive in a woodland off Northwest Highway, that 340 hourly workers along with 35 salaried employees produce some 100,000 jars of pickled products every day, thereby adding to the heap of more than 29 billion pickles eaten in America each year.
And also perfuming the air with the fragrance of vinegar brine.
It`s a smell that hangs about the no-windows-type factory like an invisible cloud, clinging to anything and anyone who enters or leaves.
”What my wife makes me do is take off my shoes in the garage,” said Gerry Lales, who works at the plant along with Raul Zamorano Jr.
”It`s embarrassing, really, especially when you get right off of work,” Zamorano agreed
”I been here so long I don`t smell it,” said Richard Stromberg, the company`s distribution manager. ”But I`ll tell you, anyone who comes here will find it really smells like a pickle plant.”
From Monday to Friday, and sometimes Saturday, trucks packed with ton barrels of short, thin-skinned cucumbers rumble past a small guard house and around the generic looking plant, finally backing up to huge steel doors that roll open.
The barrels are unloaded, then the cucumbers are refrigerated until they`re moved into a warm and humid room where the vegetables are graded, washed and sent off by conveyor belt to the packing room next door.
It`s there that the hourly employees, working in two shifts, stand along either side of three conveyor belts and stuff cucumbers into jars. Everyone is dressed in the mandatory blue coats (white coats for management types), blue hair nets and fluorescent orange earplugs. No one is allowed to wear jewelry. Once packed, the jars pass under opaque green waterfalls of the pungent, spicy garlic-and-vinegar brine before being capped, sealed, labeled, boxed, loaded on refrigerated trucks and sent back out into the world.
Take all of the cucumbers processed by Claussen in one year and lay them end to end and you would have a chain that just about stretched from the moon and back, said Lales, who will replace John Lillie at the end of December as Claussen`s general manager.
The Claussen label is pasted on jars of relish, kosher tomatoes and sauerkraut, but the company`s most famous product is its refrigerated pickle, which is not pasteurized, or heat processed, like pickles found on non-refrigerated shelves in the grocery store.
Still, the house specialty, the refrigerated pickle, is a relatively new product for the company.
Founded in 1870 in Chicago by Hans Claus, the company originally produced the traditional heat processed pickles-those in which cucumbers are packed in jars, brine added, and heat applied-which have a long shelf life but are generally soft, thanks to the heat.
In wasn`t until the early 1960s, well after he had taken over the family business, that Claus` great-grandson Ed Claussen began to experiment in the hopes of developing a better pickle. After about five years of research, he perfected the crunchier refrigerated pickle.
”It`s without a doubt the best-selling product of it`s kind,” said Claussen from his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. ”Most people like it crisp because that`s the foremost quality looked for in a pickle product.”
According to surveys completed by the national marketing firm of A.C. Nielsen ScanTrack, Claussen makes the No. 1 refrigerated pickle in America and claims more than a 70 percent share of the U.S. refrigerated pickle market, Lales said, and about 15 percent of the total U.S. pickle market. The company`s top competitors include Vlasic and Heinz.
Claussen products are shipped to supermarkets as well as food service clients that include hotel chains such as Hyatt, Westin and Hilton. Less than 5 percent of the company`s output is exported to Canada and Japan.
Claussen said he believes the whole operation got started because Claus, his great-grandfather who emigrated from Germany, got stuck with a load of cucumbers that he couldn`t sell. Rather than waste the vegetables, he pickled them.
The business flourished and declined over three generations at a plant at 5100 Western Blvd. in Chicago before Ed Claussen took the reins in the late
`40s, according to Claussen. In 1970, Oscar Mayer bought the company with the intention of taking a regional product national.
To do that, Oscar Mayer opened a second Claussen plant in 1974 in Fullerton, Calif., and two years later moved the original operation to Woodstock. Oscar Mayer now uses the Fullerton plant to manufacture its cheese- lunchmeat-and-cracker Lunchables products.
Oscar Mayer makes $2.5 billion a year from products sold under four labels, the most lucrative being Oscar Mayer and Louis Rich, followed by Louis Kemp and Claussen. Through numerous maneuvers in the business world, the once family-run business is now a sliver of a huge conglomerate. Philip Morris Companies owns Kraft General Foods which owns Oscar Mayer which owns Claussen. Ed Claussen gives kudos to Oscar Mayer for maintaining the high production standards originally set by Claussen and for not attempting to change the product. ”They were very smart to do that,” said Claussen.
”They`ve left well enough alone.”
”I didn`t realize how big pickles are until I started here (18 years ago),” said Stromberg, the distribution manager. Now whenever he tells people where he works, ”they say, `Pickles? How did you ever get involved in pickles?”`
Lales said even he had scant knowledge of the business when he joined Claussen 17 years ago. He remembers once toeing the dirt and shooting the breeze with a farmer at the edge of a crop field in Michigan.
Proud about what he had learned thus far as Claussen`s new procurement manager, Lales complimented the farmer. ”I said, `Nice crop of pickles you have there.` He said, `That`s cabbage.`
”Uh, oh,” Lales said recently while sitting in his office at the Claussen plant in Woodstock. ”That`s when I knew I didn`t know what I was talking about. That was my baptism into the pickle business.”
Lales has learned that pickle packing can be a cheerful business, too.
”Just saying you work at a pickle company always brings a little smile to people`s faces.”
Often, he said, the reason people smile is that ”nobody knows who makes pickles, they`re just there.”
Claussen agrees, adding that most people don`t know how a pickle is made or by whom, ”they only know if they like it.”
Does anyone realize, for example, that the pickled cucumber has been around for 4,000 years and has been enjoyed by a host of famous people, including Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, George Washington and Bill Cosby?
Or did you know that you can gorge yourself on a whole jar of dill pickles, knowing the feast contains only about 100 calories since pickles are 95 percent water?
Or did a teacher ever inform you that Dutch farmers, who settled in Brooklyn around 1650, are to be thanked for introducing the pickle to America? Then it`s unlikely you know about National Pickle Week in May, either, or the fact that the amount of pickles consumed each year in the United States is equivalent to 9 pounds for every man, woman and child.
It`s all true, said Richard Hentschel, executive vice president of Pickle Packers International (PPI) in St. Charles, a trade association that has members from America and 17 other countries, including Sri Lanka, Finland and Turkey.
Of all its 100 or so members, Claussen is one of the biggest players in the pickling industry, Hentschel said.
The company is also considered to be a big player in Woodstock.
”I would say the style of Claussen is extremely professional and community oriented. They really are part of the community,” said Jean Marie Saidler, executive director of the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce.
”They`re one of our leading companies,” both in the number of volunteers and donations the company generates for the McHenry County United Way, said John O`Hagan, executive director of the non-profit organization.
”They have first-class people and do things in a first-class way.”
Capitalizing on the fact that almost 90 percent of Claussen`s hourly workers are minorities, most of whom are Hispanic, the company entered into a cooperative learning agreement in 1985 with Northwood Elementary School in Woodstock. Under the agreement, Claussen sends two employees to the school every day for a few hours to teach English to non-English speakers. Eight Claussen employees are involved in the program.
The effort earned Claussen a Program for Private Sector Initiatives citation in 1988 that was signed by then-President Ronald Reagan.
While most of Northwood`s non-English-speaking students are Hispanic, the volunteers also work with kids from India, Asia and other countries, said Zamorano, who is in his fourth year of tutoring.
Currently, 50 of the school`s 540 students are receiving help from the Claussen group, said Northwood principal Barbara Levandowski.
”It`s a lot of fun teaching the kids,” said Zamorano.
One of the first students he ever worked with is now in 4th grade. ”To see him talking English, it makes me feel good because I taught him,”
Zamorano said.
Besides being a community leader, the company is also a leader within Oscar Mayer in regard to recycling, said Al Frommeyer, secondary resource manager for Oscar Mayer. Besides baling its cardboard, Claussen also recycles glass, office paper, aluminum cans and even puts rejected cucumbers through a machine that sucks out the water, thereby reducing the amount of waste.
Claussen has cut its waste output by about 55 percent from four years ago and is looking into selling the de-waterized cucumber refuse for fertilizer or as pig feed, said Stromberg, who is also the company`s recycling coordinator. Cucumber refuse is something Claussen has to deal with on a year-round basis, unlike companies that produce pasteurized pickles once a year and store the product in huge vats.
Claussen shops for cucumbers in Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois in the fall; Mexico in the winter; Texas and Florida in the spring; and Missouri and North Carolina in the summer.
After becoming the company`s shipping and receiving clerk 24 years ago, George Miarecki remembers being taught by Ed Claussen to taste cucumbers from each truck before accepting the load. The same went for testing shipments of sauerkraut and outgoing cases of pickles.
Miarecki estimates having had to taste 70 to 80 cucumbers a day. ”In the beginning, it`s something to get used to.”
Two or three times a year, the inspections would turn up more than a rotten load of cucumbers. Miarecki said he found three snakes, about five frogs and one baby alligator.
About the alligator, Miarecki quipped, ”We just put it in a jar and someone took it home.” Actually an employee took the animal home, and that`s the last Miarecki ever heard of it.
Pickle recycling, pickle packing, pickle tasting, pickle smelling. Life seems to be pickles, pickles, pickles all day long for these people at Claussen.
How could they stand to look at a pickle, much less eat one at the end of a work day? Yet those asked said they still relish the taste.
”Every once in a while I`ll take a jar home for myself,” Zamorano said. Lales said, ”My preference in pickles leans toward the small midgets and the sweet and sour chips.”
Claussen said, ”Have them in my refrigerator now.”
There`s just no getting around it, Lillie said. ”It`s a fabulous fun finger food.”
