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Visiting the pretzel empire in Hanover
Listen to this articleGreg Maderitz, director of manufacturing at the Hanover plant, said the unique twister machines date to the 1940s. A team of Snyder’s mechanics apply the right care to keep the machines running.
“This is an iconic pretzel — the twisted sourdough pretzel,” he said. “There’s not many people twisting pretzels anymore.”
Machines are a big part of the Snyder’s of Hanover operation. Machines run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, twisting, cooking, cooling, packing and shipping pretzels. An estimated 300,000 pounds of pretzels come off the line each day, Maderitz said.
Snyder’s developed automated processes to form all of the creative shapes for which many of its products are known. For example, those best-selling pretzel pieces do not come out of the oven that way. A unique process shakes and breaks the product into pieces.
About 500 employees keep the pretzel lines moving nonstop through three buildings at Snyder’s. The dough is mixed and extruded into the final shapes before the raw pretzels move by conveyor belt into one of the ovens. Snyder’s houses eight production ovens in the 400,000-square-foot plant.
The majority of pretzels move into the ovens on a top conveyor belt before circling back underneath for a second pass through a “slow-dry kiln zone,” Maderitz said. Passing through the kiln zone helps eliminate any potential defects by cooling the pretzel at a slower rate, he explained.
Few changes
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After the pretzels are baked, they move through the wall above workers’ heads into Building Three, where teams of workers scurry about packing, taping and moving boxes along for shipment.
The pretzel-making process hasn’t changed much since the Hanover Canning Co. — the forerunner to Snyder’s of Hanover — was founded and first began producing Olde Tyme Pretzels in 1909. More automation is involved today — for example, the dough was mixed and poured by hand for many years. No longer.
“The process is somewhat the same, but bigger, better, faster,” Maderitz said.
