/ck/ - Food & Cooking

I've never done any such work myself, but a friend of mine used to work in a factory that made school lunches. The factory was somewhere near Florence, Kentucky. He was occasionally allowed to take home boxes of food for free. He once gifted me two big boxes of the classic rectangular school pizza. It took a while but I eventually finished off both boxes. The large freezer in his parents' garage was filled with chicken nuggets, rectangle pizzas, chicken sandwiches etc., I hope this post is on topic and to your liking.

>be me
>work in a factory that prepares food products

>>15513778
it's soul crushing. it doesn't seem like a big deal, you wipe the lip of the tray to keep the excess food off and then align it roller for the wrapping machine but then you realize you're going to stand there for the next 8 hours doing this for $7/hr

I worked at a small coffee roaster and it was cozy as fuck. Free coffee all day. Put in headphones and roast those bags man. Plus on Fridays they would bring in lunch for everyone

>>15513920
coffee is a beverage, not a food

My friend's fiance is a fudgepacker. She takes fudge and puts it into packages. Never brings home any free samples, that cunt.

>>15513911
hmmm I worked in a pipeline sleeve factory and a box factory (that didn't actually make finished boxes... just inserts :( )

this sounds better
but only slightly

>>15513778
I myself have never worked in food service, food production, or factory assembly line (though I engineer product automation equipment).
College dorm mate picked up a job at an off-brand junkfood snack cake company. Worked two shifts, then quit, occasionally he would start talking about it then suddenly go silent and cover his face.

>>15513778

Worked at a mr Christie's factory for 3 years. The place was a city and made every thing under the brand, cookies crackers and everything else. You had specific entrances for each section you worked at. So there was fuck ton of safety rules and you had outfits, boots, gloves hair net, hard hat, plastic apron mandatory every shift. You were allowed to eat anything you wanted off the line, as long as you didn't stop it or contaminated it. But you can't take any finished boxed product home. Working the cookie line had a sign up sheet and wait list to work at. Because people wanted to inhale a box of chips ahoy during a shift. Usually the people who had been working the longest got first pick. You could once a month buy broken cookies and crackers in a bag for like a dollar and the bag was 5 lbs. The people sucked, definitely something wrong with long term factory workers. Never made friends with anyone. Working any line with cheese you smelled of cheese for days after. Honestly it was a terrible job for the pay at the time in 2011. I've seen 4 people get brutally hurt and only once ate something that I wasn't supposed to, which was a massive blob of unused cheese.

>>15514013
He got raped there, anon. Why didn't you support him through his ordeal?

>>15514015
>Can eat anything you want off the line
>As long as you don't contaminate it
So you're eating next to food but the belt doesn't become contaminated?

>>15514018
> snack cake
>He got raped there, anon.
This, for sure. Many such a case. Never ever work for a "snack cake" company.

>>15514038

No one works over the belt, most if not all are covered by metal tunnels or clear plastic walls. You wear a face mask as well. You just turn away and eat it quick.

I watched a coming-of-age movie once about two guys working in an meat-processing plant that ended in teen-pregnancy, satanism and suicide.

>>15514015
>only once ate something that I wasn't supposed to, which was a massive blob of unused cheese.
lmao based

>>15513898
extremely based? I'm drunk enough to not know how to post anymore. but at press time I'd love to eat my way through a stock of Rectangle School Pizzas and chickienugs.

>>15513778
I worked at home office at a food company and visited some out of state co-packers to check in and whatnot every once in a while and I learned that there is a subset of poor people in this country that work most of the year, then get their tax refund and just fuck off and quit for a couple of months. Just always thought that was fascinating, we'd see a spike in people not showing up to work late winter and apparently everyone knew this except for me lol. It's so stupid, it's fascinating.

Also saw a guy lift another guy on a pallet in one of those tall forklifts like 40 feet in the air to get something off the top shelf that was stuck. Guy didn't even wear a helmet, just zero fucks given.

>>15514128
>Also saw a guy lift another guy on a pallet in one of those tall forklifts like 40 feet in the air to get something off the top shelf that was stuck. Guy didn't even wear a helmet, just zero fucks given.
based

>>15514082

It was the orange goop that goes in ritz bits sandwiches with cheese that got stuck in the mixer. Ate some then tossed out the rest. Waste of 40lbs of cheese.

>>15514156

OSHA would have some words for that stunt.

>>15514156
>>15514180
Oh yeah it was not cool, I don't think the owner of the facility would have appreciated it, but I ain't a snitch. Also saw guys zooming around in those Toyota electric forklifts at mach 3 speeds pretty regularly. Those goddamn Guatemalans are fucking fearless.

>>15514178
that stuff is delicious. I'd love to get a whole mouthful of the stuff.

>>15514199

Doesnt taste the same when it's a warm paste still good though.

>>15514128
>Also saw a guy lift another guy on a pallet in one of those tall forklifts like 40 feet in the air to get something off the top shelf that was stuck. Guy didn't even wear a helmet, just zero fucks given.

Everyone will treat you like a retard if you don't move at machine speed.
The girls are easy and will make the first move.
It may not exactly be a Power Process but it does get the blood moving.

>>15514222
Oh I'd bet it doesn't. A mouthful of it might be enough to cure me from ever buying cheese-sandwich crackers ever again. Not that I've had any in years. But a mystical substance in my mind, licking it off those neon-orange crackers. I might just remember that taste on my deathbed.

>Be retarded union asshole employee
>get pissed off at employer for not paying millions for working stupid people job
>piss all over assembly line of cornflakes
>video it
>one year later
>post video to social media

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/03/14/video-of-man-peeing-on-kellogg-assembly-line-prompts-criminal-investigation/

>You will assemble the product

I work in a seafood processing plant but don't have any stories really. Fish can have a shitload of parasites and somalis are useless. That's about it

>>15513940
Coffee is actually a bean. It can be consumed in multiple ways, including by eating.

>>15514225
based Klausposter

>>15514258

Well in my experience with it, you can easily get tired of the food you see and especially smell all the time. Luckily for me since I worked there years ago, a fudgeeo or Ritz cracker I can still enjoy.

>>15515596

It's anything like my friend working at a chicken processing factory, it's pretty horrific handling meat. Sometimes he would cut open a chicken and it would explode in a ball of puss. Any animal meat is pretty gross. Be glad what you buy is decent.

>>15513778
a friend of mine used to work in a pork scratchings factory
he would often talk about how certain pieces had to be roasted several times to burn off all the hair

>>15513778
work In vegetable production factory, shifts are hell, eventually i switch to sanitation, please for the love of God never fucking buy pre chopped salad, the day I left they had an e coli outbreak, everyone there was a 5ft tall Indian so they couldn't reach the top of the machines to scrub them, food handling procedures weren't followed, i was told to just leave old carrots in the machine, lots of harsh chemicals too

>>15513778
I had a customer tell me that he would never buy from concentrate orange juice because he used to work for a supplier in Florida and he saw too much shit fall in those vats.
T Kroger dairy fag

>>15516670

There's been salad recalls seemingly every month in the last year. Doesn't matter the country.

>>15516476
I've never worked in a food production plant but I'd imagine as much. The one exception to this in my experience seems to be, ironically, meat processing workers. Never met one with an ironic bone in their body, the work is no joke so I don't know if I'd say "they love what they do", but there's a palpable sense of pride in their product, and even seeing how the sausage is made never seems to put them off. Kinda reassuring.

I worked in a chicken products factory. We made pretty much everything you can buy frozen.
The funniest thing I saw was in the chicken wings section, which is kept at 8c. We were packaging honey garlic wings and the sauce pump jammed. The repairman was working on it, the pump is above the bagging machine, about 8 feet in the air. He would yell at the operator to start it and stop it as needed for testing. Then during a test, the pipe disconnected and he got sprayed with honey garlic sauce. He wanted to yell STOP but he had a facefull of viscous honey so he was hard to hear, it took about 30 seconds before the operator noticed and stopped it.
The repairman was entirely covered in honey, it took 2 guys to help him remove all his suit and clothes so he could shower. He smelled like honey garlic for a couple days after.

>>15513778
not me but my gf worked at a meat packing factory in sydney packing food into basically tv dinner trays. The treatment of the workers there was abhorent. It was run like a sweatshop by the chinese owners. People would disregard hygiene rules entirely. Meat would be pumped full of artificial flavors with some sort of syringe devise. I tasted the end product, because she somtimes got free tv dinners. Tasted absolutely shitty. Why do people buy these disgusting mirowavable ready meals. They are unhealthy AND taste like shit.

>>15513778
I worked in a meat factory once, they where hard on cross contamination, and literally had a line between the raw and cooked side that would be instant dismissal if you crossed it

>>15514180
like "based" probably

>>15513963

I unionised a load of door makers in a factory in Ireland once. Nice guys.

>>15517641
Good job, door makers are important to our way of life. Without them we'd have to enter buildings through windows.

>>15513778
Making tomato ketchup and mayo, gets filled, not selling, or we get the merchandise back. Either it gets its use by date cleaned off the packaging and gets stamped a new longer one, or it gets squeezed packaging at a time by a worker in drums, from that drums it gets added to each fresh batch by percentage making a fresh ready to eat shit.

I work as an warehouse analyst for a large food distribution company. You guys really shouldn't buy any nestle product if you're in the southwest states. Whole bunch of their shit went to multiple distributors that was contaminated or went bad. We got a deal for them to buy back their inventory that can't be sold but doubt many distributors bothered and I know heb couldn't give a fuck. Doubt it makes the news but it's basically blue bell all over again except at least blue bell had some moral backbone to fix their shit and report their errors.

>>15513940
Found the retard

>>15517825

Aw dude, thats fucking awful!

>>15517091
lol I would love to see that.

>>15513778
My first job was working the belt at a cherry processing plant. Stand in one place, watch for imperfect cherries and discard, repeat all day long. It was mind numbing. No headphones allowed because safety issues. No conversation either because 90% of the staff only spoke spanish. All for minimum wage.

I lasted one season but it motivated me to only work desk jobs, no more real work for me.

>>15513958
>is a fudgepacker

Haven't worked at any places that prep food stuff directly but I spent couple of summers calibrating different kinds of scales and often that would include places that prepare fish, meat, sausages, candy, sugar, wheat all kinds of shit. Worst were the meat and fish places because there was either that sort of sweet smell of meat or fishy smell, usually cut with a little bit of bleach in the background from the floors and then a cold and damp environment especially at the fish lines. Can't imagine what it would be like to work there 8 hours a day, 5 days a week all year round doing the same shit.

One time in a candy factory we were calibrating a large syrup measuring scale and it had some leftover syrup in it and about a million flies. Have to imagine at least some of that makes it into the candy.

My dad's a mechanic. When I was a kid he went to a beef jerky factory to fix some of their machines. We got a massive bag (like 5lbs) of beef jerky for free.

>>15516985
animals gave their lives for those delicious meats OP, must be respected. I imagine that's why they don't tire of it?

>>15518291
People who work on massive factory farms routinely abuse the animals

>>15518296

>>15518296
thats why you don't buy from those places, meat taste bad when is from a factory farm and you can tell

>>15518301
Literally anyone with half a brain knows this. It's inevitable. I could give you case studies and documentaries like https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1122&context=mlr_fi or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KArL5YjaL5U or even anecdotes from people who worked at suppliers for Perdu and shit but you, being a massive fucking faggot, given many sources of individual factory farms abusing animals, will be unable to make the connection that it occurs everywhere because we don't have 24/7 surveillance on all largescale factory farms in the world, even though factory workers are notorious for being absolute fucking sociopaths due to being stuck in a dead-end, menial job no matter what is produced, and these huge fucking corporations will try to save money wherever they can by giving as little space as possible. I'm not even saying that you shouldn't eat meat either, just making the argument that just because someone works with meat doesn't mean they automatically take pride in their work and respect animals.

>>15518409
>workers bad
I'll admit it's a refreshing change of pace from the usual communist rants but how did you type this thinking anyone would take you seriously?
Also animals don't deserve respect, most humans don't even deserve respect.

>>15518409
Oh nevermind I see you did make your dubious claim ultimately muh corporate greed's fault, all is predictable in the world again

>>15513778
>do summer work in local paper mill every year, shit is cash, banter with coworkers, a lot of family and friends work there, wage is great
>one year they don't need vacation workers for some reason
>go to the office of the company that intermediates in shit like this locally, they always have work and I don't intend to be a poorfag for the next college year
>find job in small sauce factory, they make oriental sauces like for wok palaces and shit but also typical Dutch-Indo shit like peanut sauce and sambal and some things like ketchup
>pay is a lot less, everything starts early (only day shifts), longer drive, so this better be good
>lot of cleaning shit, assemble the various pumps, pipes and shit, at the end of every everything has to be disassembled, cleaned, disinfected and sealed
>I can still remember the smell of the disinfectant 10y later, wasn't even bad
>fun things: drive mop machine through warehouse, drift with forklift over wet areas previously mopped, nearly topple it once
>less fun: lots of cleaning, large risk of the one fat tokkie coworker to spray you or otherwise try lame pranks I recognise from a mile away
>this fat person is alright in his own way although heavily annoying, he lives on the edge though, safety wise
>Sambal (ground red chillies) is stocked in barrels and it's an important ingredient in many sauces. Because the barrels are ~200kg and the kettles in the 'kitchen' are quite high (or the ceiling quite low) there's a special 'sambal pump', custom made. But it's a bitch to clean so fat coworker insists on never using it, instead he just drives the forklift into the kitchen with the barrel on a pallet, lifts it up to kettle level, climbs onto the pallet (needing to bow down bc of said low ceiling) and rocks it back and forth until it teeters horizontally over the kettle wall, dumps in roughly the required amount, breaking a handful of safety and hygiene rules

There's a lot more but post is too long

>>15514225
F

>>15518296
>>15518409
factory farms =/= meat processing plants, and I never said anything about loving animals, just that they believe in their products and eat of them heartily and with pride. Another guy jumped in about respecting it for the sake of the animals' sacrifice, which may play some part, but the impression I've gotten personally has more to do with the sanctity of Feeding The Nation, and taking their duty to provide hygienic protein to their people very seriously. Maybe it's all posturing, certainly most working men talk a big game about anything they do for 40 hours a week, but outwardly at least they don't break that character for anything.

bump

>>15515559
lol based

>>15518270
>his gf packs meat>>15517134

>take first job as a night cleaner for a produce packing factory
>start cleaning newly built machine that owners put a lot of money into
>scrubbing away hard, trying to make good impression on boss
>turns out a piece of metal on the conveyor belt wasn't dulled down enough
>end up slashing a huge cut down my index finger
>even cuts through glove
>freak out and run quickly to the bathroom which is on the other side of the room I was in
>end up splattering blood everywhere on the railing, floor, and belts
>in the bathroom trying to get bleeding to stop
>cut is bad, need to tell someone
>tell an advisor who let's me into his office for bandages and disinfectant
>more blood gets on office door and carpet
>bleeding finally stops, asks me if I want to get back to work
>feel bad for saying no so get back to it
>work hard for a couple of hours, really building up a sweat
>wipe sweat off face and notice new glove has blood stains
>turns out my cut reopened and ran back to the bathroom
>glove ended up filling up halfway with blood and sweat
>realize I was dripping blood all over the factory without even knowing it
>hear boss calling my name over speaker
>asks me and other worker about blood stains
>face goes white as I know I'm fucked
>say fuck it and admit it was me
>makes me and the other guy clean it up before we leave
>notbad.png
>other guy is pissed but does it anyway
>eventually he gets tired and calls it in
>boss tells me to call it quits too as day workers were about to come in
>know that there's no way I'll be able to clean everything and go home
Every day since, I always saw a dried blood stain in some nook or cranny and wiped it. My boss thinks it was all cleaned up but I know that there's no way it was, I literally felt lightheaded after the incident. Worst of all it was on my 2nd day on the job and I got mean looks from the other guy since. I'm not sure if any blood molecules or whatever ended up getting in the food but it's been 3 years and I haven't heard shit.

>>15520248
Jesus fuck, this wasn't in the US was it? Because we tend to treat bodily fluids pretty seriously around food.

>>15514128
>Also saw a guy lift another guy on a pallet in one of those tall forklifts like 40 feet in the air to get something off the top shelf that was stuck. Guy didn't even wear a helmet, just zero fucks given.
I worked in a warehouse selling mass-produced gift shop crap and some actually nice stuff like puppets with designs by natives. Because of that, 90% of the warehouse workers were natives and they used to do the same shit as that all the time, supervised by our midget chink boss who looked exactly like Jack Ma.

>>15520248
>>face goes white as I know I'm fucked
yeah, all that bloodloss and I'm sure it's being-admonished that drained the color from your face.

>>15514015
>The people sucked, definitely something wrong with long term factory workers.

Fucking this. I used to work for an auto parts inspector that would get contracted out to Bosch and other companies often. Large scake factory work is soul crushing and I can't reccommend it to anybody. The only reason you're there is because they haven't found a way to replace you with a pile of cogs and pistons yet.

>>15513778
Worked in a fryer snack factory.
They have huge fucking tumbler cookers for cooking meat and pulling it apart at the same time. One time I was there when one of the tumblers opened to dump out the meat, I usually wasn't there for it.
That was one of the most horrible smells I have ever smelled. Pure death. It filled the entire hanger with steaming death horse smell.
Only thing that topped that was the smell of a maggot infested garbage bin I opened once.

>>15514180
Fuck OSHA they're a bunch of pussies.

I did mechanical repairs in a food processing factory, the bathroom was super far away from where I was working by myself and I pissed in a half empty coke bottle and set it aside to throw away at the end of the day. A few hours later my coworker, a huge Australian biker who literally took part in "fight club" stuff on the weekends, unexpectedly showed up and walked up to me with a grimace on his face, asking me if I did something to his coke because it tasted awful. I just stuttered a bit and then became petrified there was CCTV footage somewhere, but I got through the day and he never said anything again.

>>15514038

Go to work for Blue Bell. "We eat all we can and sell the rest."

And it turns out that's substantially true. A friend of mine was a delivery driver for Blue Bell years ago. He was allowed to eat all the Blue Bell ice cream he wanted for free.

My guess is that since the employees didn't have to hide that they were eating the food, they didn't have to take a little bit out of each carton. They would just get their own carton and a spoon, keep it separate in the truck, and eat some whenever they wanted. It was a win-win for everyone.

>>15514128
>Also saw a guy lift another guy on a pallet in one of those tall forklifts like 40 feet in the air to get something off the top shelf that was stuck. Guy didn't even wear a helmet, just zero fucks given.

I've done something like that a couple of times, except no pallet. I just stood on the prongs that stood out.

I was doing a little work on the top of the house and that's all they had to lift me up high enough to do what I needed to do.

>>15520336
California

>>15514015
>I've seen 4 people get brutally hurt
What happened to them?

>chicken processing plant
>the chicken that doesn't get used by KFC orders and other chain restaurants in a day goes to Nando's vats
>Nando's uses day older chicken and covers it in sauce to hide the worse flavour

Also

>Work in pork processing plant
>Abscesses from infected hormone needles all over the pigs
>Sometimes they explode when being cut, spraying avocado textured and coloured paste across the room

>>15516486
>cut open a chicken and it would explode in a ball of puss
come again my nigger?

what the fuck causes this?

>>15520248
dude i work in workers compensation law and if you are in a good country like mine, you should have gone to the hospital straight away and reported it. we had a fella break his fingers in a grain mill a few weeks back and we made him 450 000 in Aud which is tax free. the insurance company pays for it. this goes for all you posting in this board, if you get injured at work report it to a hospital or your higher ups straight away. Because down the line you could go to a workers comp lawyer and get a big settlement out of it.

>>15521717
Shitty farmers packing the chicken to tight in the farm so they peck AND loading them with enough antibiotics that they never actually get sick. So pockets of puss just start to build up around a tiny piece of dirt that got jammed into the muscle at some point.
Happens with pigs´a whole lot as well