Factory Tours!

June 9, 2004 9:21 PM

Factory Tours!Too cool. A site devoted to collecting and sharing publicly available tours of various production facilities: candy, breweries, cars, candles, power plants... Just the idea transports me right back to being a grade-schooler watching films about How Things Are Made. I am so there, dude.
posted by NortonDC (15 comments total)

All the info looks to be available without a login--that seems to be required only for submitting new factories with tours!

Ruthlessly stolen from Flutterby, which stole it from somebody else.
posted by NortonDC at 9:21 PM on June 9, 2004

This is fun to look around in. Who's up for touring Samish Bay Cheese?
posted by Salmonberry at 9:33 PM on June 9, 2004

*suffers disabling flashback to 3th grade field trip*

But seriously, living in L.A., my 3rd grade field trip was to the Filmways Studio where they were producing "Mister Ed" and "The Addams Family" at the time (well, not at that exact time; I got zero celebrity autographs, but I saw the hole in the table Thing's hand came through, and Ed's stable was surprisingly clean).
posted by wendell at 10:02 PM on June 9, 2004

Shame it's so incomplete. Why on earth would they exclude Canada and, for that matter, the rest of the world?
posted by five fresh fish at 10:56 PM on June 9, 2004

Probably due to budget cutbacks, FFF. Or mere spite.

Awesome. I'll add the Mumm Winery to the CA list. Very cool tour with lots of high tech and interesting facts about how champagne is made. Anyone here know what a "rittler" is?
posted by scarabic at 11:31 PM on June 9, 2004

Cool link, thanks. I hope it'll just continue to grow over the years.

When I was little, I went on a class tour of the Frito Lay factory in Nowhere, Kansas, and I'll never forget it. It sounds boring, but watching things get conveyored into machines and come out changed, then get sent into other machines and come out in bags is very neat to watch.

Unfortunately (as of right now) this tour is not included on this site. Maybe it'll show up at some point. Great find.
posted by interrobang at 12:39 AM on June 10, 2004

Man, grade school tours. We had field trips to the grocery store, the saw mill (lots of those, since we lived in a town with 300 people and 2 major saw mills) and the best was to Tim Hortons. The Tims tour rocked! We got to put the jelly in jelly donuts!

In high school, we also took rather more serious tours of a copper mine and a waste treatment plan (uh, vats full of shit, yay?).

Oh, and my family once toured a coal mine because we were just that bored. The only really interesting thing about it was that despite being in the middle of nowhere, a four hour drive from the nearest city of any size, their office building had $50,000 doors carved with a fairly complete depiction of the mining process.

And the best tour ever? (Though, topping the jelly donuts is tough.) Upper Canada Brewery. Free sample tasting before and after!
posted by jacquilynne at 4:58 AM on June 10, 2004

jack daniels distillery tour is a hoot, what with the colorful tour guides (looked bored out of his mind, but he was actually great - part of the act, i guess) and the history of the place, which they throw in as you wander the grounds. if you're anywhere near lynchburg and have a few hours to burn, take the detour and enjoy. i'll never forget the smile my wife flashed me when she caught a whiff of the barrelhouse...
posted by caution live frogs at 5:35 AM on June 10, 2004

A few tours not to be missed, some of them are on the site already:
-car manufacturing: saw this in particular in DaimlerChrysler, near Stuttgart, but they work similarly in the US. The presses used to form the doors are really impressive, as is the level of robotics used.
-water or waste treatment plants: no really, it's neat to know where it all goes, and there's a lot of interesting stories behind them. Deer Island (Boston) and the Hialeah (Miami, FL area) both give good tours.
-ice cream: Ben & Jerry's (Vermont) gives a tour of their factory, and, yes, free samples. The giant silos of milk and cream are alone worth the trip, as is the Flavor Graveyard, of flavors long since taken off the shelves.
-Boeing (Seattle area): Biggest rooms in the world, because they hold something like 6 commercial airpplanes at a time. You don't see a lot close up, but the scale more than makes up for that. Great history, huge robotics factor.
posted by whatzit at 6:23 AM on June 10, 2004

What's all this then? Field trips being primarily educational? Finding out how things they use are made? Finding out how actual businesses run? Actually seeing place where they might grow up to work someday? What kind of Commies are you people?? Don't you know field trips are for goofing off, and if you happen to learn something it should be about animals you will never see outside a cage, or people who have been dead for decades if not centuries?

No, seriously, I'd like to tattoo the url on a particular teacher's hand.
posted by ilsa at 9:16 AM on June 10, 2004

Give me the Scharffenberger factory tour over any of the ones on that site, any day.
posted by u.n. owen at 9:23 AM on June 10, 2004

If you can, snag a bottle-manufacturing tour. It's amazing, seeing these great glowing globs of molten glass squirting into mechanical contraptions right out of steampunk fiction, formed and released and run through automated inspection and packing machines.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:23 AM on June 10, 2004

Don't forget: York County, PA (where I lived as a kid) is the factory tour capital of the world!

I've gone on pretzel tours, cookie tours, winery tours, dairy tours...and probably some others I've forgotten.
posted by JoanArkham at 10:24 AM on June 10, 2004

Cool site! I wish we still got to go on field trips like this as part of our jobs.

I stood outside a large display window of a Krispy Creme once, watching the raw donuts get fried and flipped and glazed. A little bit like Rube Goldberg. As a matter of fact, if there was a Rube Goldberg appliance factory, I would take a tour of that in a minute!
posted by onlyconnect at 10:42 AM on June 10, 2004

Micro-brewery and winery tours are always great. I'm a home brewer and wine maker, so it's cool to see that their process is pretty much the same as mine, except on a larger scale. Plus there are always copious free samples.

I've also toured a Budweiser plant. What I remember most is the sheer speed of the process, and the immense amount of beer that is spilled.
posted by MrMoonPie at 11:06 AM on June 10, 2004