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November 30, 2006

Packing peppers

If you drive along the Santa Paula freeway in autumn, generally between September and November, you may notice the unmistakable odor of roasting peppers as you pass a steam-belching industrial plant on the south side of the highway. It's just west of Santa Paula, right at the Todd Road overpass near the county jail. I've caught whiffs of that powerful, smoky scent periodically over the years, and always found myself wondering what was going on inside that nondescript building. And I always vowed to find out someday.

This year I finally had an excuse. I poked around and learned that the place is one of the county's few remaining processing plants for local farm products. Saticoy Foods Corp. has been in that spot since 1967, packing peppers and pimientos in a wide range of containers for an equally wide range of customers. I called Jerry Hensley, the president, and he invited me to tour the plant.

It's a noisy, messy place. And it features one of the scariest pieces of industrial machinery I've ever seen. But it was interesting, too.

The plant handles thousands of tons of peppers each season. It has contracts with about 10 growers, who send 20 to 30 truckloads of bright red bell peppers -- the color they acquire when mature -- to the facility each day during the fall harvest season. At 22 to 24 tons per load, that's a lot of peppers.

Peppers have become an important crop in Ventura County, worth more than $23 million a year and ranking 10th in the Agricultural Commissioner's annual list of top county crops.

"It's one of the best places in the world for growing peppers," Hensley said.

Pimientos look kind of like bell peppers, but are more heart-shaped and have a pointed end rather than a lobed one. You can stand a bell pepper upright on a table, but a pimiento will topple.

When the trucks arrive, the big metal bins they carry are hooked to hydraulic lifts, which dump each load into a hopper. A conveyor system feeds the peppers into the plant, where they're washed and sorted, the seed pods are removed, and the remaining flesh is chopped into various sizes depending on intended use. The process involves high-pressure streams of water, and the interior of the plant is a frothy red mess of scattered seeds and bits of skin. The plant is crowded with employees sorting through sodden pepper parts as they speed past on the conveyors, picking out those that were not properly seeded or are not fit for consumption. About 350 people work at the plant at the height of the season, Hensley said.

Some peppers face a different fate, at least initially. Across a yard from the packing plant, there's a separate system of hoppers and conveyors that carries peppers high into the air and dumps them into the end of what look like giant cannon barrels angled toward the sky. They're hollow metal tubes a couple feet in diameter, with thick walls, and they slowly spin in place.

At the lower end of each tube is a big gas pipe, shooting a huge jet of fire into the rotating barrel and heating the entire thing to such a high temperature that you can barely stand to approach within 50 feet. There’s a bank of several of these glowing, fire-spitting dragons, which have tendrils of smoke curling out of one end and charred peppers dropping like fleshy briquettes from the other. The whole assemblage could play a terrifying role in a horror movie.

The cleaned, sorted, diced pepper and pimiento bits are sent through an acidified bath and then placed in bottles, jars, cans or drums. Saticoy Foods sells everything from 2-ounce jars of pimiento pieces -- you may well have one in your refrigerator -- to 55-gallon drums of pepper parts.

The big drums clearly are not intended for home use; they're packed for commercial food producers. When you buy a bucket of pre-mixed macaroni or potato salad at the grocery store, or find a scoop of it on your plate at a restaurant or deli, the colorful and crunchy bits of pepper in it likely were packed at that noisy, steamy, fiery packing plant alongside the freeway outside Santa Paula.