Baking&Snack - February 2013 - 52

J&J SNACK FOODS

A constantly diversifying company
J&J Snack Foods’ 14 plants are perpetually evolving to hit consumer and customer trends, including organically certified
snacks and allergen-conscious products as
well as items produced in myriad packaging formats, according to Alissa Davis,
director of marketing for the Pennsauken,
NJ-based company.
Among its facilities across the nation are
two USDA-certified plants, four bakeries, two frozen novelty operations and
six plants specializing in soft pretzels and
other snacks. J&J’s flagship novelty facility, MIA Products, is the country’s largest
producer of frozen ices at a rate of more
than 1 million per day.
The bakeries pack J&J Snack Foods’
branded products and co-manufacturer
for some of the most prevalent consumer
packaged goods companies, quick-service
restaurants and retailers, Ms. Davis said.

continues to search for ways to expand its product offerings. Last
summer, it acquired Kim and Scott’s
Gourmet Pretzels, a Chicago-based
company reported to do about $15
million in annual sales. Like J&J,
Kim and Scott’s had a retail and
foodservice presence and brought
in new customers. The niche company’s products are also all-natural.
“There’s a halo of wholesomeness
with that brand that we thought was
attractive,” Mr. Law said.
J&J adopted a take-no-prisoners
approach when Mr. Shreiber founded the business, according to Tom
Weber, senior vice-president who
oversees production at several of the
company’s plants. Take its mechanical soft pretzel twisters. In 1982, the
company obtained exclusive license
rights for the manufacture and sale
of AMF pretzel twister machines.
Today, the company owns nearly all
of them, according to the company’s website. “There were about 120
made, and J&J owns 119 of them,”
Mr. Weber noted.
When it comes to operations and
new product development, the company attempts to blend agility with
automation and leverage its size and
scale while maintaining an entrepreneurial approach.
Building flexibility into a
high-speed facility can be seen
throughout J&J’s plant located in
Pennsauken, NJ. Around 500 employees — 400 in operations and 100
in customer service, sales, accounting and marketing — work at the
200,000-sq-ft complex, which houses seven lines and can crank out 2.1
million pretzels every 24 hours.
The plant’s versatility is reflected
in the sizes of its mixers. The six
BEW and Peerless horizontal mixers range from 400 to 1,000 lb. Small
Frozen SUPERPRETZELS are automatically bagged,
closed and placed in a carton in a separate
temperature-controlled packaging room at the
Pennsauken, NJ, facility.
Blane Sutton

/ Baking & Snack / February 2013

batches keep the dough fresh and
pliable. They also allow J&J to make
changeovers on the fly.
“People don’t want just a plain
pretzel,” Mr. Weber said. “They want
more and more varieties of them.
As a result, we’re not seeing longer
runs. We’re seeing requests for more
sizes, more flavors in different types
of packaging. We’re becoming more
nimble in what we produce.”
Ingredient handling is also designed for versatility. The plant’s
four silos range from 45,000 to
115,000 lb and hold soft, hard and
blended flours that are distributed
to the lines via use bins. Bulk handling also includes 2,000- and 5,000lb Fleischmann’s cream yeast tanks.
Most minor ingredients, including
salt, sugar, starch and flavor bites,
are hand-scaled.
The operation has five traditional
soft pretzel lines. Four lines — each
with six employees — make 2,000
lb of product an hour. The six pretzel twisters on line No. 1 produce
14,400 2.5-oz pretzels hourly. The
eight twisters on line No. 2 make
16,800 small pretzels an hour. Four
on line No. 3 create 5,500 5-oz pretzels an hour. Versatile line No. 4,
with four big twisters and six smaller ones, can make pretzels in multiple shapes and sizes (see “New twists
on pretzels” on Page 50).
Fed by a Schroeder continuous
mixer, line No. 5 comprises eight
king-size twisters and makes 4,000
lb or 12,000 of the top-selling 5-oz
SUPERPRETZELs each hour. It’s
nicknamed “the dream line” because
in the mid-1990s, Mr. Shreiber told
his chief engineer that he wanted to
build a line that had twice the capacity of the four older ones and employ half the people.
“The engineer told him, ‘That’s
impossible’ and that he was dreaming,” Mr. Weber recalled.
It took a year for Mr. Shreiber’s
dream to come true, and today,
the line — operated using only

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