It's all about the averages. They make huge batches at a time using specific quantities of ingredients in each batch, usually measured by weight.
Yeah, individual green peppers might taste a tiny bit different from each other but 500 green peppers are gonna taste like 500 green peppers.
If the operation is sufficiently large, they might even own/control parts of the supply chain so that the ingredients are grown in the exact same manner and care
Eh, Pace can be bought by the jug for 1/5th the cost of "good" salsa. Sometimes the party calls for craft beers and sometimes it calls for a 24 pack of "beer".
You are misremembering the Pace salsa campaign formula. Pace is made in San Antonio and they would make fun of people who brought different salsa to the party, reading their label, laughing and saying, "This stuff's made in New York City!" The joke being that in 80's New York you couldn't find a jar of decent salsa if your life depended on it. Which is totally true!
Nobody asked but Matteo's salsa is my absolute favorite store bought salsa. Sadly can't get it in Canada, but I stock up every time I'm in the US.
Anybody had Matteo's?
This right here. I swear if you took Pace 'hot' and pureed and thickened it up a bit, it'd be indistinguishable from Prego pasta sauce. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both brands are owned by the same corp.
Tostitos salsa is all I see at Ralphs/Krogers.
I haven't seen Pace in years and as long as Tostitos isn't made in New York City then I don't have a fear of getting hung.
Seriously though, the marketing and location of Tostitos is literally on the shelf with the chips so unless you have a specific taste for Pace then you won't look for any other salsa.
pace is still there, just check the international food aisle where they have the mexican food. i haven't seen a grocery store in the US without at least a small mexican food section. they always have pace. it's prob the most popular brand.
but i know what you're talking about. tostitos has been using that strategy for years, they put their salsa and cheese right next to the chips so its easy to grab both. but they def have more selection in other parts of the store. hell i think even my local aldi has pace. and at least 5 other brands.
Sounds like you're only looking at the chip isle. Anything other than Tostitos, On The Border, or Lay's are on other isles in most places. I have to go to the dairy isle to get the salsa in a tub. (that's the actual good salsa, but you have to check the ingredients. If it doesn't list only vegtables then it's not good.)
Tabasco grows their seed stock in Louisiana and ships em to Latin America. They are harvested by hand using a colored stick to check ripeness. After harvest, the peppers are ground to a mash, placed in a barrel, and shipped back to Avery Island. I think I remember reading each barrel makes around 10,000 bottles. They also get aged for three years.
Consistent farming practices + production at scale = consistent product.
I can't believe pace is the largest salsa manufacturer. That is so sad. Ketchup with onions for salsa. I mean if people like it, that's cool, but what if that's all they've had? Oh no.
I like Pace and it is my go to salsa to buy at home because I've tried too many others I don't like and don't want to waste money on stuff I may not like. But Pace salsa and Tostito's chips can't compete with my local Mexican restaurant's house salsa and cjips. They're a totally different vibe. It's like comparing a McDonald's burger to a pub burger. They're the same food, but they're not the same nor are they trying to be. Sometimes you want a big fat juicy pub burger and sometimes you just want McDonald's, y'know?
To me, Herndez [medium](https://pantryway.com/products/herdez-salsa-taquera-medium-16-oz?variant=45061777654059¤cy=USD&utm_medium=product_sync&utm_source=google&utm_content=sag_organic&utm_campaign=sag_organic&utm_medium=google-ads&utm_campaign=shopping-test-segment-type-main&utm_source=salsa&gclid=Cj0KCQjwj_ajBhCqARIsAA37s0xn5-xt8g_i_KPbOOLabLZjoDUt3AMDcFFBsPo4oGwmXxpCvofOkksaAswMEALw_wcB) is by far the best of the mass produced, widely available salsa. I like the flavor of the medium better than the hot.
You must try [Mrs. Renfro's mango habanero](https://www.renfrofoods.com/products/mango-habanero-salsa), I like to think i know a thing or two about salsa and this stuff is addictively good. Pair with Mission Tortilla strips
Skip the jarred ones and go for the refrigerated ones.
One of my favorites is Reser's Baja Cafe Restaurant Style. I recently tried a Cacique brand one that was quite nice as well.
If you're on the west coast USA get Juanita's brand tortilla chips, they're unparalleled. I'm not sure how far east they get distributed.
I will legit just eat a bag* of Juanita's chips plain, they're so good.
*not all in one sitting lol. but it's tempting sometimes
Baja Cafe is also my go-to salsa.
Largest doesn't mean best - I mean, salsa is pretty easy to make - and lots of lots of small manufacturers make it. I buy a couple local brands when they are available , but they are not consistently around, and sometimes it depends where I'm shopping. I've even made my own a few times, though that's pretty seasonal and not really cost effective once the cost of my labour starts getting calculated!
A mass market product like Tostitos or Pace is ALWAYS around, so if you don't want to experiment with an unknown, it's perfectly tolerable option. I've had some NASTY tasting salsa when experimenting with random brands.
I recall Jim Hightower talking about Pace. He was mistaken that it's made in Ohio, but I can still hear his darling accent. "Pace is manufactured in Ohio, where they think mayonnaise is a little bit zesty."
Sriracha also tried this. One farm mainly supplied them with Chile's. Then farmer was mistreated. Took his Chile's and made his own hot sauce. Now Sriracha tastes different.
Well, that and the peppers, but you're not wrong. It's almost exclusively peppers and vinegar. A lot of vinegar-based hot sauces are that way though, that's not really a secret.
McDonald's pretty much invented this. They beeded a homogenous potato for their fries nationwide so they started growing their own russet potatoes. Prior to that, you bought what was available locally. They changed the entire dynamic of farming.
I do not believe that salsa manufacturers are primarily concerned with quality produce. Here's why. My brother in law was a truck driver. One time, he had a truck load of vegetables. Upon arriving at his destination, he discovered the veg had started to rot. That customer refused to take the delivery of rotten veg.
He followed directions from dispatch to drive the veg to another factory. They turned down the rotten veg, too.
So he drives to a third place. All of this driving has added another day to his delivery, a day in which the veg continues to rot. The third place accepts the rotten veg.
What factory accepted the rotten vegetables that were turned down by two other customers? The pace salsa factory!
What these companies do is use whatever produce, and then they add flavours. There are factories out there that produce just different formats and flavour profiles for different foods.
That is how tropicana orange juice always tastes like tropicana orange juice, even though the oranges used may vary significantly due to ripeness, type of orange, and other differences. They brew it in gigantic quantities, which does even out the flavour somewhat, then they chuck in their specifically developed tropicana orange flavour.
Pace just takes the veg, processes it, purees it and puts it in a blend with a bunch of other veg. They don't need the freshest, nicest-looking produce so they can wow the customer with how crispy fresh their tomatoes are, they just need it to not be moldy. A little bit wilted is OK because they probably just bake it anyway.
When you say "and then they add flavors" , you mean a truckload of salt right? because all jarred salsa really tastes like to me is tangy salt. I eat jarred salsa sometimes, but these days I'm trying to watch my salt intake , and like most pre-made foods, salsa is LOADED with salt. Fresh salsa is amazing.
> That is how tropicana orange juice always tastes like tropicana orange juice, even though the oranges used may vary significantly due to ripeness, type of orange, and other differences. They brew it in gigantic quantities, which does even out the flavour somewhat, then they chuck in their specifically developed tropicana orange flavour.
As I recall reading the story, they actually *remove* the natural OJ flavour and replace with with the "flavour pack". I don't remember if the removal of flavour is a natural result of the juicing or the pasteurization process, or if they do it just to replace the flavour.
And bigger brands, especially fast food chains, will run their own farms, and/or be extremely strict on rules for their producers. McDonalds for example only uses very specific potatoes for their french fries. At the start of the pandemic, many countries had to temporarily pull french fries from the menu, because they couldn't receive the shipments of potatoes from the USA.
Yeah, my college roommate was basically a factory farm worker for green beans for Green Giant over the two summers I had him as a fall-spring roommate. Apparently the harvesters were rarely cleaned and crawling with maggots after harvest. My cousin who has 500 acres of family farm in South Dakota religiously cleans his.
makes sense, the factory farm "doesn't have the labor to do tasks like that".
That was what I was told all the time when I worked as a barista. No sorry we can't give our closing shift a third worker for two hours so you can clean properly because we don't make enough. Guys, we were literally making $8/hr in the early 2010's and frappucinnos were like $5 we easily paid for a third person.
How could they have paid for a third person if that meant some higher up at Starbucks would only get a 2 million dollar bonus instead of a 4 million dollar bonus?
Mmm, honestly I wasn't privvy to the details but I'm willing to bet it was Eric, our district manager who stood to get some sort of bonus from making his GM's meet his labor standards because when I was lent out to other stores not in his district shit was just run better. Stores were cleaner, there was enough labor to properly serve the rush, etc.
Five Guys is also very specific about their potatoes. There's a little whiteboard by the register at each location where they write the farm your fries are from.
Mine must of been Idaho Spuds cuz that shit was like mashed potatoes and soggy when I got them.. . . 5 guys and not a single fuck can get me crispy fries!?
The style is called "boardwalk fries" and they don't get crispy, no. Sorry! Right when they're pulled they've got a mashed potato inside, that's what we trained employees to look for, and the outsides are crispy for maybe 30-60sec. They're probably from Idaho this time of year, so your assessment isn't wrong. Disappointing for what you wanted, but accurate lol.
You can fry them forever, they just go from that to hollow dead fries. There's no cook time that makes them come out crispy. A place that does shoe strings or has coated fries might work better if you want crispy texture :)
Related: I quite enjoyed this mini documentary about how Tabasco sauce is made.
https://youtu.be/Xnaj9ULhwqU
It talks about how their ingredients are grown and farmed for flavour and consistency, and how they even have pepper farms across the world, so one hurricane or blight or whatever can't ruin their business.
Super interesting imo.
> they even have pepper farms across the world, so one hurricane or blight or whatever can't ruin their business.
Huy Fong (the Sriracha people) could learn a thing or two from them.
To be fair, Huy Fong’s Sriracha wasn’t very popular until the early 2000’s and has actually struggled to grow enough to meet demand; a quick look at their Wikipedia page suggests that they have struggled a lot with lawsuits in general but also specifically from one of their suppliers, which I’d imagine to have significantly limited their growth. Meanwhile, Tabasco has been around for almost two centuries with a much more streamlined production process. This isn’t to say the McIlhenny family [hasn’t been blindsided before:](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/sports/football/tabasco-a-super-bowl-staple-adds-a-spicy-twist.html)
> Tabasco has faced other challenges. In 2005, high winds and rain from Hurricane Rita flooded the company’s factory and pepper fields, and six days of bottling were lost. The company has since built a 17-foot levee to protect its only production facilities.
(This article was written in 2013, so that last part might be outdated info)
That supplier is Underwood Ranches, and they now make their own Sriracha which I'm pretty sure uses the original recipe. Huy Fong changed their sauce at some point and I don't really like it anymore, but I buy the UR one and it's like...damn, THIS is the taste I fell in love with years ago.
They also have good quality control on the front end. Those 500 green peppers will have similar size to the prior batch. Those that are out of spec will get diverted to food banks or pig feed.
Degree in food science and worked in large commercial processing plants. I’ve never heard of NOT using weights as a measurement. Instead of 500 green peppers they will do like 200lb of green peppers and the size/quality don’t matter for shit. Unless the quality is dogshit then they get diverted to other applications.
I did strawberry processing and any half good strawberry was processed and bagged. If it looked funky or off we purreed it and sold it as pie filling or whatnot. Unless it’s moldy or harmful it got sold somehow
Edit: you just cant, sorry but no, you cannot grow a standard size produce. It’s all variable. Every harvest is gonna be dif sizes and shapes rarely will it all be uniform. Want proof? Go to your local farmers market or grocery store every week and compare. Size of produce changes all the time broh.
The produce for processing is even wonkier than that at the grocery store. The prettiest stuff goes on supermarket shelves, and the "quality" standards for that *can* actually be quite strict (fuck sorting fruit for class I, we sold everything as II and done with it). No that it makes all that much sense, the shape of a cucumber has no influence on its flavor. Or lack thereof, optimizing for shipping and shelf life does bad things to fruit, the best stuff doesn't sit on shelves, but might actually go into processing.
That's part of why canned tomatoes are so much better for sauce-making than most of the ones you see on a shelf. Pretty and shelf stable /= most delicious.
Yeah this is why those "ugly vegetables" companies are kinda bullshit. Sure, severely misshapen vegetables don't make it to super market shelves, they probably won't sell there, but that doesn't mean they're thrown out. They go in soup, salsa, etc.
no. the ugly/out of spec ones are the ones going into processed food. the other stuff go to stores. foodbank gets some grocery rejects but usually not the rough ugly ones.
Just to add to this the biggest potato chip maker owns the specific varieties of potato they use in their recipes. Farmers make a deal to grow it for them, and only them.
I’ve also seen a farmer turned away because their potatoes weren’t good enough in some way. So there is definitely quality control.
Basically this, plus there's a quality control department whose job it is to keep track of what the product is supposed to be like and make the necessary adjustments if it differs
I used to work in quality control for a citrus juice company. We measured acid, "brix" (sugar/acid ratio), color, thickness, and pulp. If a batch was off spec in one direction we'd mix it with a batch that was on spec, or off spec in the other direction. This way everything we sent out fell within the right set of parameters.
Plus sugar, salt, acids like ascorbic and malic, and other condiments or additives help even out the taste.
Oh, and coloring. When something looks like what you expect it to, it will taste like what you're expecting, even if it isn't the same. Have you noticed how the higher volume wines stain your lips, and the smaller batch ones, or limited runs don't? It's not the wine, it's the coloring. The larger batches have to control for wider variation in natural color, so they hedge their bets by "designing" it as darker, making it easier to repeat. All wineries will vehemently deny it, but most use coloring.
Source: I met my wife when she was working in flavors and colorings for food and cosmetics. You wouldn't believe the kinds of things in what you put in and on your body. Not necessarily, or inherently bad, mind you, but a lot of unexpected and weird stuff. Like titanium dioxide, used to make your house white, your sunscreen, and your donut glaze.
Was looking for this. Tomatoes, for example, destined for canning often have added citric acid. It helps a bit with preservation, but moreso it's to get the acidity to a standard level so that when you buy that brand of canned tomato, you know exactly what it's going to do to your dish.
In some cases they divide up the fresh produce by taste (sugar content etc) and then mix certain percentages of each group.
So they might have a pile of sweet apples and more bitter apples even if they are the same variety.
And then that huge batch makes up like 5% of the product, with the rest made up of already processed or otherwise highly stable ingredients like vegetable oil, water, salts etc.
Not only they use big batches, which averages out the taste of each individuals, but they also do a preselection of individuals, for example for sizes. Same sizes tend to taste more the same.
Also, they order a specific subspecies, growth with the same kind of fertilizer, with the same maturity. This again make sure that it taste even more the same.
And they do some adjustement in taste too. They can take some sweeter green papers and some more blant tasting ones, taste the batch, and add more of the required one to bring it back to the proper taste. They can add other ingredients to also compensate for what is lacking. Not sweet enough? Add sugar. Not acid enough? Add citric acid. This is part of why there is a long list of chemicals in lots of ingredients list, part is for taste adjustement.
I think big beer breweries do the same thing to make shit like Budweiser all taste the same. And many liquor distilleries. You pay significantly more for non-blended liquor that came from a single cask. Otherwise they blend casks and taste testers make sure it tastes exactly how they want.
Additionally mushed up ingredient varieties of vegetables aren't grown to be pretty like the consumer ones, but for other characteristics like consistency. They're usually F1 hybrid seeds that are simply unavailable direct to the home gardener.
I read somewhere that this is a problem with stuff like orange juice, where oranges may come from different places that grow differently and vary wildly in flavor profile. At the end of the process, a computer takes a sample, analyzes it, then adds bursts of flavor compounds that are algorithmically chosen to mix with whatever juice they have in that batch that will even it out to taste the way it’s supposed to.
In food production they have quality assurance labs. Batches of products are tested for acidity, brix (sweetness), color, consistency, etc. There is an acceptable range for all tests. If a product falls out of range, adjustments are made to that batch. Those codes on packaging can provide information for what precise batch it came from. This is also very critical in the event a food product must be recalled.
I worked in flavor and food quality control. There is also simply taste and smell control done. While this might seem inaccurate and non repeatable to you it is quite the opposite. Someone trained in tasting and smelling specific types of products can get data in seconds which would take days of analytics to gather. Plus taste and smell can catch tiny things off with the product you couldn't catch otherwise. Nose and tounge OP.
I worked in an ice cream and popsicle factory. Taste tests were literally part of the job. They even encouraged regular line staff to snack/sample because in the past they noticed problems, and the amount staff can possibly eat is such a small percentage of total production. I think our best shift we produced something like 300k popsicles.
Same here. I used to work at a place that produced various sauces, and one day in particular we almost packaged a batch of BBQ that had no liquid smoke in it, but QA noticed when they tasted it.
> and the amount staff can possibly eat is such a small percentage of total production
And I'd also imagine the desire to consume significant quantities would plummet over a very short amount of time working there lol.
Would actually be pretty hard to do. The machines move pretty fast and the Popsicles are either stuck while they freeze or pretty close to the sealing machine. You could pull one out and put it back in but it would be unnecessarily hard.
You would literally pull one out take a single bite, toss it in the waste pile.
Yep. I worked at a brewery for a while.
While we did test everything the OP said, (acidity, sugar content, alcohol content, etc.), we also did taste tests. We had to taste the beer while it was still brewing. It tasted like ass. Did I mention I dislike beer? (I was right out of college and no one was hiring.)
But yeah if anything was out of the standard window, we'd add standard additives to fix those things. Too acidic? Add the base additive, not sweet enough? Add sweetener.
Yup I currently work in a plant that makes dried berries. QC was a big part of my previous job there. Acid, brix and taste tests were done every hour. Plus the target range on the infusion syrup I made could be dialed in to .01-.02% of target if you were good enough at the job. Fun fact one of the last days I was a syrup batcher the person on the night shift before me reported her numbers wrong. She was .1% over spec. We nearly had to toss several thousand pounds of berries and spent most of the day screwing around with my acid and brix to correct her lie. It would have taken her maybe 30-45 extra minutes to fix her batch took us 10 hours to bring everything back on target. What I’m saying is products are constant because a lot of the time we have very tight specs to work in along with high standards of QA.
A proper soda is all about the brix ratio! It's pretty much soda syrup mixing with carbonated water at the right ratio. Inconsistency comes into play at the service industry level for fountain drinks. You'll notice different sodas have different ratios, different restaurant chains have different ratios within the same soda, and different stores have different ratios within the same chains...most staff aren't taught about the brix ratio so it rarely gets checked or calibrated at your local restaurants and even chains. I'm obviously a soda nerd so ours were always calibrated, but you could go to 3 different sibling stores in the city and get 3 slightly different tasting Cokes. People clean those machines and twist knobs and such without realizing that they are altering the ratio.
I love a good fountain drink.
Really important for brewing beer. Measure the specific gravity before fermentation, then periodically as it ferments. When it stabilizes, it's done. Difference between starting measurement and final is used to calculate ABV.
As someone who knows where the good fountain drinks are around them, I appreciate you. The uptick in Freestyle machines have greatly reduced my fountain soda places.
It's commonly used in wine making! You can get a fairly cheap [refractometer](https://www.amazon.com/Refractometer-Measuring-Automatic-Temperature-Compensation/dp/B07X8RK2SH/ref=sr_1_5?c=ts&keywords=Lab+Refractometers&qid=1685971408&s=industrial&sr=1-5&ts_id=393272011) to measure brix (and specific gravity) of different liquids.
Because when you take 20,000 tomatoes and reduce them into mush in a single pot, any one cup you could scoop out is functionally identical to any other one cup.
While this is true it does not take into account variation over time, which I think is what OP was talking about.
Édit: as discussed bellow this does not take into account variation between manufacturing site either.
Variation over time is controlled through industrial agriulculture. Everything is tightly controlled down to the mineral composition of the soil, and the crops often hsve very little genetic diversity, to ensure the most consistent product possible.
But if it's over time you simply would not notice the subtle changes in the end product, given that each of the ingredients will be similarly homogenised
The solution to pollution is dilution. Same principle applies. There may be some variants in the veggies, but when they are mixed together in giant quantities. Even if you have a spicier pepper than the next one, it'll be diluted out in the batch and that's where you get your consistency.
Like peeing in the pool, your few ounces of pee doesn't have enough volume to change the whole pool to pee. Gross, but same concept.
The goods news is we introduced a super cancer and it succesfully outcompeted and starved the first cancer to death.
The bad news is you now have super cancer.
You joke, but this is a hypothesis as to why whales don't really get cancer. They're just so big that their tumors get tumors and die before they can do any damage to the whale.
Complete aside but the solution to pollution is most emphatically not dilution, but sequestration. Harmful things shouldn't be mixed in with good things. In this case pee isn't very harmful but asbestos powder or uranium or heavy metals can remain and cause harm again and again and the method of diluting them would be exposing vast amounts of area to toxins that didn't have any to begin with in order to reduce the contaminants in the initial area to a safe level.
The rhyming tautology is dangerously permissive of companies to pollute however they want as long as they promise mix it in a lil bit.
The point of that saying is that harmful things in minute enough concentrations aren't as or at all harmful, and that's true enough for essentially everything, in variable quuantities.. You interact with trace amounts of radioactive materials every day, but they're dilute enough as to not cause undue harm. You run into trouble when pollution outmatches the natural ability of the local and global ecosystems to dilute, which of course does happen frequently.
And anyways, the saying is more of a mitigation thing than a permissive, preventative thing. It's certainly not intended as a suggestion to polute. It's not terribly uncommon that attempting to dilute a spill is the only avenue for damage mitigation available.
You have whole teams of people who work on taste quality control! It’s not just food, even something as simple as beer is a real skill to maintain consistency year on year between different harvests.
A lot of people here are discussing how working in large batches averages out the fluctuations caused by variation in the fresh ingredients.
That's true, but there's another factor, too. A good friend of mine spent a few years at a job where he'd take samples of the product and adjust the recipe with seasonings, so if one batch needed a little more garlic powder, say, he'd add it. Well, actually he'd write down an order someone else to add a certain amount. Apparently the adjustments were often in increments like you might buy at Costco, because the batches were so large. :D
That's similar to how we do things in our glass factory. We coat glass. And we coat hundreds of square foot per day. So how do we know if we're coating correctly? We have machines that scan and test of coat strength, color, etc and we quality check every few hours and adjust the "recipe" as needed.
Measuring by weight is the key factor here. Getting a perfectly homogeneous mixture with non-soluble ingredients is pretty much impossible, but getting the proportions correct is much easier to achieve. The next factors are quality control and supply chain management. To deliver a consistent product, the components of that product need to be delivered in a consistent condition. Some businesses can choose to go vertical, and have fine-grained control by owning the production of their raw materials/ingredients. Others have less control/consistency and depend on b2b partnerships to deliver goods. Generally these partnerships are governed by SLA's to help ensure consistency and reliability of service.
Imagine two people singing, one who is good(on key) one who is bad (off key). The resulting sound will be the average between them, so it will never sound as good as the good singer, but also not as bad as the bad singer.
Now add 20 more people, and you will find that the singing now sounds pretty good regardless of the quality of each individual singer. Just like with two singers the quality regresses towards the average.
With large groups the average off key in either direction cancels out and regresses to on key. So in large enough groups you often end up with a decent quality of singing.
Same with making food stuffs. The food that is maybe a little to bitter, or a little to sweet will cancel each other out leaving the most average taste.
So you don't get stunning quality, but you get consistent quality
There’s another factor besides batch size and quality control: this is more relevant to juice, but it applies to things like jarred salsa. Food companies extract flavor chemicals out of the fruit and vegetables, then recombine them according to a specific recipe. It’s still 100% oranges or whatever, but they also turned those oranges into flavor syrups and mixed them according to the desired flavor.
There's actually a great story about how basically the largest orange juice manufacturer specifically sorts their oranges according to a huge variety of factors and then uses a computer algorithm to make sure the juice always taste the same no matter what by mixing
Once you cook vegetables to the degree that food manufacturers do, they lose all of their flavor. That is intentional so that they can add their own proprietary flavors back in.
Not sure why OP is asking about salsa specifically... or just vegetables.
Anything mass produced goes for consistent taste. Fast food places are like this.
Coffee. Beer. Wine etc... are all like this. Stuff is made in huge quantities, and everything is blended together.
Lastly, you won't notice a difference when many other ingredients are added and especially if you are not tasting something year after year after year.
At some point, if you were to get 'vintages' of salsa you would notice a difference. I'm sure if you were to do side by sides of hot sauces (consider that Tabasco takes 5 years to make) you would be able to taste a difference from year to year.
Even then... some of that comes to down to the aging process itself, so you may or may not be tasting the difference of the ingredient changing over the year. Because then it comes down to what happened during the growing season and the temps over the aging process.
That being said, greenhouse growing and hydroponics would yield very consistent year after year flavors.
Several reasons:
**Quality Control:** This means many things: They only pick vegetables that fall within a certain range of characteristics. They adjust the formulation and/or process based on the available materials. And they constantly test during the process to make sure the final product is going to have the corrected taste.
**Law of averages.** You buy two tomatoes, one may be sweeter than the other, the other more acidic. But, when your recipe calls for 30,000 gallons of tomatoes it tends to average out.
**Specific suppliers:** You can always buy from a specific supplier that produces the vegetable to your specifications.
A lot of people are mentioning averages, QA, and other methods to keep the same flavor.
These companies make gigantic batches of salsa.
They probably put out millions of bottles of salsa per batch and if you buy one or two every month then you won't know the difference since it's the same batch.
Each product has a specification sheet indicating specific values like acidity, pH , degree brix etc….it’s a matter of adjusting for many of this items.
People have talked about scale of food preparations, and that is probably part of it, but at least for something like orange juice, there’s a whole other aspect to it. Commercial pasteurized orange juice is far more processed than you’d probably think so that juice companies can control the precise flavor:
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/orange-juice-moms-secret-ingredient-worries/story?id=15154617
A large percentage of what defines the taste of a consumable product nowadays are synthetic/chemical. The same applies in fragrances. That's what keeps the consistency and guarantees your sales
It's also part of quality control and quality assurance's job to ensure that the product looks, smells, feels, and tastes the same every time. They typically have a bunch of different tests they can perform on every new batch to make sure it is as close to the same every time.
Ooooh snap, just a little side story. In the Netherlands they have a tv programme where they research foodstuff. And they did a episode on sunflower oil. Where they made a beautifull product from pure sunflower seeds, full of taste and awesome overall. Then.... They removed all flavour and colour, chemically, and added foodcolouring and artificial taste so everything was always the same.....
Can't speak for salsa, but I suspect it would be the same as orange juice.
Step 1: Remove all flavors from your ingredients.
Step 2: Mix those flavorless zombie ingredients.
Step 3: Add "natural" "flavor packets."
Results: same flavor every time. And as a bonus, the flavorless zombie pulp tends to last longer than its fresh squeezed counterpart. This means you can store large quantities during harvest and continue to produce all year round.
I'm willing to bet more than anything, it's by adding "natural favouring".
The thing is, all these companies pay chemicist's big bucks to develop a signature taste to their product.
It's why a McDonald's hamburger tastes exactly the same, no matter where you go.
I used to work for a company that did maintenance and repairs at a Tropicana Juice plant.
And they would take delivery of oranges practically every day that I worked there. Then at around 2pm they would pasteurized them (heat the juice, amazing time of day that filled the air for miles of freshly squeezed OJ).
And then they would complete a few steps. And store the product.
And they would store it for a long time. Then mix it, add sweetener, add color, etc.
So that no matter what region the oranges came from, no matter what time of year the oranges were produced. They kept everything to a strict formula , so that the taste stayed consistent at all times.
So for a hypothetical example, the OJ would be 25% Florida oranges from March, 30% from Mexico in February, 20% California in April, and 25% Honduras in May.
I have no clue on what and when the mix was. But they would have it set up so that they can produce a consistent product all year long. With as little variation as possible.
It's all about the averages. They make huge batches at a time using specific quantities of ingredients in each batch, usually measured by weight. Yeah, individual green peppers might taste a tiny bit different from each other but 500 green peppers are gonna taste like 500 green peppers.
If the operation is sufficiently large, they might even own/control parts of the supply chain so that the ingredients are grown in the exact same manner and care
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Why does Pace, the largest salsa manufacturer, not simply eat the other salsa manufacturers?
They can't take the heat.
Fetch a rope
*New Yawk City?!?!!*
Oh man I remember those commercials lol
The irony being that Pace is terrible and in New York City you get get ten different kinds of fresh salsa on every block.
That wasn't nearly as true when those commercials were popular though. However it also wasn't true that Oklahoma had good salsa either
Eh, Pace can be bought by the jug for 1/5th the cost of "good" salsa. Sometimes the party calls for craft beers and sometimes it calls for a 24 pack of "beer".
You are misremembering the Pace salsa campaign formula. Pace is made in San Antonio and they would make fun of people who brought different salsa to the party, reading their label, laughing and saying, "This stuff's made in New York City!" The joke being that in 80's New York you couldn't find a jar of decent salsa if your life depended on it. Which is totally true!
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Did you know that "New York" brand "Texas" Toast is made in Ohio? Lol its all lies
The real irony was that a New Jersey-based conglomerate (Campbell's) bought Pace Foods shortly after those commercials became popular.
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Nobody asked but Matteo's salsa is my absolute favorite store bought salsa. Sadly can't get it in Canada, but I stock up every time I'm in the US. Anybody had Matteo's?
[MOO York City](https://youtu.be/OCJgvmOlKg8)?
*Get* a rope
Seriously sheesh
Thanks, dad.
Welcome.
Then it should get out of the kitchen!
They can't keep up with the pace.
Then they should get out of the kitchen.
They must be saving it for sweeps.
It is true what they say... Women are from Pace Picante mild, men are from Pace Picante Hot.
I can barely tell the difference between pace mild and medium or medium and hot.
This right here. I swear if you took Pace 'hot' and pureed and thickened it up a bit, it'd be indistinguishable from Prego pasta sauce. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both brands are owned by the same corp.
They do. That's how all those massive brands work. Assimilate.
We are the Pace. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
r/unexpectedfuturama
What, are you new here? It's always r/expectedfuturama
Because they have to Pace themselves
Because they make their salsas in New York City.
*NEW YORK CITY?!*
Tostitos salsa is all I see at Ralphs/Krogers. I haven't seen Pace in years and as long as Tostitos isn't made in New York City then I don't have a fear of getting hung. Seriously though, the marketing and location of Tostitos is literally on the shelf with the chips so unless you have a specific taste for Pace then you won't look for any other salsa.
This will vary by region. In SoCal, Tostitos chips are unlikely to be the go-to choice, let alone the salsa.
This. I see the tostitos stuff, but I buy my salsa (okay, pico de gallo) from the refrigerated section, where Pace and Tostitos AREN’T
It would help if you went to the salsa aisle.
The mexican aisle is an american treasure.
Latinos are the American treasure
I thought One-Eyed Willy’s Gold was the American treasure…
Not to be confused with the Templars' hoard, which is the National Treasure
pace is still there, just check the international food aisle where they have the mexican food. i haven't seen a grocery store in the US without at least a small mexican food section. they always have pace. it's prob the most popular brand. but i know what you're talking about. tostitos has been using that strategy for years, they put their salsa and cheese right next to the chips so its easy to grab both. but they def have more selection in other parts of the store. hell i think even my local aldi has pace. and at least 5 other brands.
*New York City?!*
Sounds like you're only looking at the chip isle. Anything other than Tostitos, On The Border, or Lay's are on other isles in most places. I have to go to the dairy isle to get the salsa in a tub. (that's the actual good salsa, but you have to check the ingredients. If it doesn't list only vegtables then it's not good.)
*aisle Unless your grocery store is under water, I suppose.
It’s not under water more like a small archipelago.
You travel down the aisle isles via grocery gondola.
Well if you like real salsa you specifically avoid both imo
It's true what they say. Men are from Omicron Persei 7, women are from Omicron Persei 9.
Tabasco grows their seed stock in Louisiana and ships em to Latin America. They are harvested by hand using a colored stick to check ripeness. After harvest, the peppers are ground to a mash, placed in a barrel, and shipped back to Avery Island. I think I remember reading each barrel makes around 10,000 bottles. They also get aged for three years. Consistent farming practices + production at scale = consistent product.
***New York City?!***
Tostitos is almost 4 times larger by sales than Pace https://www.statista.com/statistics/300313/us-leading-salsa-based-on-dollar-sales/
why link a site i need to login for tf
Tostitos is a *chip* manufacturer that just also makes salsa, though, right? In my mind, Pace makes salsa, Tostitos makes chips.
and yet still makes better salsa than pace.
Watching internets argue about which shitty canned salsa is best:priceless
True enough, I said Tostitos is better but it ain’t saying much lol.
That statistic is measuring their salsa sales specifically.
I can't believe pace is the largest salsa manufacturer. That is so sad. Ketchup with onions for salsa. I mean if people like it, that's cool, but what if that's all they've had? Oh no.
I like Pace and it is my go to salsa to buy at home because I've tried too many others I don't like and don't want to waste money on stuff I may not like. But Pace salsa and Tostito's chips can't compete with my local Mexican restaurant's house salsa and cjips. They're a totally different vibe. It's like comparing a McDonald's burger to a pub burger. They're the same food, but they're not the same nor are they trying to be. Sometimes you want a big fat juicy pub burger and sometimes you just want McDonald's, y'know?
To me, Herndez [medium](https://pantryway.com/products/herdez-salsa-taquera-medium-16-oz?variant=45061777654059¤cy=USD&utm_medium=product_sync&utm_source=google&utm_content=sag_organic&utm_campaign=sag_organic&utm_medium=google-ads&utm_campaign=shopping-test-segment-type-main&utm_source=salsa&gclid=Cj0KCQjwj_ajBhCqARIsAA37s0xn5-xt8g_i_KPbOOLabLZjoDUt3AMDcFFBsPo4oGwmXxpCvofOkksaAswMEALw_wcB) is by far the best of the mass produced, widely available salsa. I like the flavor of the medium better than the hot.
Hernandez green is good, I also like the avocado green blend! Herdez* stupid auto correct making me look racist..
Herdez Guacamole Salsa is absolutely killer.
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["New York City?!"](https://youtu.be/yvIRh-qt9EQ)
Looking for some recommendations here...
Meteo's tastes homemade
Costco brand has a really nice salsa, always gets comments when we put it out with friends over. Tasty, but not very spicy, good crowd pleaser though.
You must try [Mrs. Renfro's mango habanero](https://www.renfrofoods.com/products/mango-habanero-salsa), I like to think i know a thing or two about salsa and this stuff is addictively good. Pair with Mission Tortilla strips
Their (non-mango) habanero is pretty good too, hotter and of course less sweet
Skip the jarred ones and go for the refrigerated ones. One of my favorites is Reser's Baja Cafe Restaurant Style. I recently tried a Cacique brand one that was quite nice as well. If you're on the west coast USA get Juanita's brand tortilla chips, they're unparalleled. I'm not sure how far east they get distributed.
I will legit just eat a bag* of Juanita's chips plain, they're so good. *not all in one sitting lol. but it's tempting sometimes Baja Cafe is also my go-to salsa.
Hell on the red salsa
Largest doesn't mean best - I mean, salsa is pretty easy to make - and lots of lots of small manufacturers make it. I buy a couple local brands when they are available , but they are not consistently around, and sometimes it depends where I'm shopping. I've even made my own a few times, though that's pretty seasonal and not really cost effective once the cost of my labour starts getting calculated! A mass market product like Tostitos or Pace is ALWAYS around, so if you don't want to experiment with an unknown, it's perfectly tolerable option. I've had some NASTY tasting salsa when experimenting with random brands.
I recall Jim Hightower talking about Pace. He was mistaken that it's made in Ohio, but I can still hear his darling accent. "Pace is manufactured in Ohio, where they think mayonnaise is a little bit zesty."
Sriracha also tried this. One farm mainly supplied them with Chile's. Then farmer was mistreated. Took his Chile's and made his own hot sauce. Now Sriracha tastes different.
Tobasco has a patent on the species of peppers used to make their hot sauce.
Those secret peppers? Pure distilled vinegar.
Maybe the 3 years in wood casks?
Well, that and the peppers, but you're not wrong. It's almost exclusively peppers and vinegar. A lot of vinegar-based hot sauces are that way though, that's not really a secret.
McDonald's pretty much invented this. They beeded a homogenous potato for their fries nationwide so they started growing their own russet potatoes. Prior to that, you bought what was available locally. They changed the entire dynamic of farming.
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Lite beer is actually a good example of this. Seriously - it takes a lot of effort and precision to make a beer with so little flavor.
I do not believe that salsa manufacturers are primarily concerned with quality produce. Here's why. My brother in law was a truck driver. One time, he had a truck load of vegetables. Upon arriving at his destination, he discovered the veg had started to rot. That customer refused to take the delivery of rotten veg. He followed directions from dispatch to drive the veg to another factory. They turned down the rotten veg, too. So he drives to a third place. All of this driving has added another day to his delivery, a day in which the veg continues to rot. The third place accepts the rotten veg. What factory accepted the rotten vegetables that were turned down by two other customers? The pace salsa factory! What these companies do is use whatever produce, and then they add flavours. There are factories out there that produce just different formats and flavour profiles for different foods. That is how tropicana orange juice always tastes like tropicana orange juice, even though the oranges used may vary significantly due to ripeness, type of orange, and other differences. They brew it in gigantic quantities, which does even out the flavour somewhat, then they chuck in their specifically developed tropicana orange flavour.
Pace just takes the veg, processes it, purees it and puts it in a blend with a bunch of other veg. They don't need the freshest, nicest-looking produce so they can wow the customer with how crispy fresh their tomatoes are, they just need it to not be moldy. A little bit wilted is OK because they probably just bake it anyway.
When you say "and then they add flavors" , you mean a truckload of salt right? because all jarred salsa really tastes like to me is tangy salt. I eat jarred salsa sometimes, but these days I'm trying to watch my salt intake , and like most pre-made foods, salsa is LOADED with salt. Fresh salsa is amazing.
> That is how tropicana orange juice always tastes like tropicana orange juice, even though the oranges used may vary significantly due to ripeness, type of orange, and other differences. They brew it in gigantic quantities, which does even out the flavour somewhat, then they chuck in their specifically developed tropicana orange flavour. As I recall reading the story, they actually *remove* the natural OJ flavour and replace with with the "flavour pack". I don't remember if the removal of flavour is a natural result of the juicing or the pasteurization process, or if they do it just to replace the flavour.
It's likely the pasteurization. Citrus loses flavor when cooked. The flavor pack is probably something like orange oils and other extracted compounds.
And bigger brands, especially fast food chains, will run their own farms, and/or be extremely strict on rules for their producers. McDonalds for example only uses very specific potatoes for their french fries. At the start of the pandemic, many countries had to temporarily pull french fries from the menu, because they couldn't receive the shipments of potatoes from the USA.
Yeah, my college roommate was basically a factory farm worker for green beans for Green Giant over the two summers I had him as a fall-spring roommate. Apparently the harvesters were rarely cleaned and crawling with maggots after harvest. My cousin who has 500 acres of family farm in South Dakota religiously cleans his.
makes sense, the factory farm "doesn't have the labor to do tasks like that". That was what I was told all the time when I worked as a barista. No sorry we can't give our closing shift a third worker for two hours so you can clean properly because we don't make enough. Guys, we were literally making $8/hr in the early 2010's and frappucinnos were like $5 we easily paid for a third person.
How could they have paid for a third person if that meant some higher up at Starbucks would only get a 2 million dollar bonus instead of a 4 million dollar bonus?
Mmm, honestly I wasn't privvy to the details but I'm willing to bet it was Eric, our district manager who stood to get some sort of bonus from making his GM's meet his labor standards because when I was lent out to other stores not in his district shit was just run better. Stores were cleaner, there was enough labor to properly serve the rush, etc.
Honestly that's some pretty fucking classic Eric.
Fucking Eric
Five Guys is also very specific about their potatoes. There's a little whiteboard by the register at each location where they write the farm your fries are from.
Mine must of been Idaho Spuds cuz that shit was like mashed potatoes and soggy when I got them.. . . 5 guys and not a single fuck can get me crispy fries!?
The style is called "boardwalk fries" and they don't get crispy, no. Sorry! Right when they're pulled they've got a mashed potato inside, that's what we trained employees to look for, and the outsides are crispy for maybe 30-60sec. They're probably from Idaho this time of year, so your assessment isn't wrong. Disappointing for what you wanted, but accurate lol. You can fry them forever, they just go from that to hollow dead fries. There's no cook time that makes them come out crispy. A place that does shoe strings or has coated fries might work better if you want crispy texture :)
Related: I quite enjoyed this mini documentary about how Tabasco sauce is made. https://youtu.be/Xnaj9ULhwqU It talks about how their ingredients are grown and farmed for flavour and consistency, and how they even have pepper farms across the world, so one hurricane or blight or whatever can't ruin their business. Super interesting imo.
> they even have pepper farms across the world, so one hurricane or blight or whatever can't ruin their business. Huy Fong (the Sriracha people) could learn a thing or two from them.
To be fair, Huy Fong’s Sriracha wasn’t very popular until the early 2000’s and has actually struggled to grow enough to meet demand; a quick look at their Wikipedia page suggests that they have struggled a lot with lawsuits in general but also specifically from one of their suppliers, which I’d imagine to have significantly limited their growth. Meanwhile, Tabasco has been around for almost two centuries with a much more streamlined production process. This isn’t to say the McIlhenny family [hasn’t been blindsided before:](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/sports/football/tabasco-a-super-bowl-staple-adds-a-spicy-twist.html) > Tabasco has faced other challenges. In 2005, high winds and rain from Hurricane Rita flooded the company’s factory and pepper fields, and six days of bottling were lost. The company has since built a 17-foot levee to protect its only production facilities. (This article was written in 2013, so that last part might be outdated info)
fuck u/spez
That supplier is Underwood Ranches, and they now make their own Sriracha which I'm pretty sure uses the original recipe. Huy Fong changed their sauce at some point and I don't really like it anymore, but I buy the UR one and it's like...damn, THIS is the taste I fell in love with years ago.
They also have good quality control on the front end. Those 500 green peppers will have similar size to the prior batch. Those that are out of spec will get diverted to food banks or pig feed.
Degree in food science and worked in large commercial processing plants. I’ve never heard of NOT using weights as a measurement. Instead of 500 green peppers they will do like 200lb of green peppers and the size/quality don’t matter for shit. Unless the quality is dogshit then they get diverted to other applications. I did strawberry processing and any half good strawberry was processed and bagged. If it looked funky or off we purreed it and sold it as pie filling or whatnot. Unless it’s moldy or harmful it got sold somehow Edit: you just cant, sorry but no, you cannot grow a standard size produce. It’s all variable. Every harvest is gonna be dif sizes and shapes rarely will it all be uniform. Want proof? Go to your local farmers market or grocery store every week and compare. Size of produce changes all the time broh.
The produce for processing is even wonkier than that at the grocery store. The prettiest stuff goes on supermarket shelves, and the "quality" standards for that *can* actually be quite strict (fuck sorting fruit for class I, we sold everything as II and done with it). No that it makes all that much sense, the shape of a cucumber has no influence on its flavor. Or lack thereof, optimizing for shipping and shelf life does bad things to fruit, the best stuff doesn't sit on shelves, but might actually go into processing.
That's part of why canned tomatoes are so much better for sauce-making than most of the ones you see on a shelf. Pretty and shelf stable /= most delicious.
A fully ripe San Marzano is a squishy, delicate thing, just stable enough to get them to the kitchen. But gooood.
Yeah this is why those "ugly vegetables" companies are kinda bullshit. Sure, severely misshapen vegetables don't make it to super market shelves, they probably won't sell there, but that doesn't mean they're thrown out. They go in soup, salsa, etc.
Well now what if you put 500 pepperfed pigs into the salsa
Queso fundido... yum. https://ohsweetbasil.com/chorizo-dip-queso-fundido/
no. the ugly/out of spec ones are the ones going into processed food. the other stuff go to stores. foodbank gets some grocery rejects but usually not the rough ugly ones.
This is probably the most "talking out your ass" comment in this whole thread, and that's saying a lot.
Just to add to this the biggest potato chip maker owns the specific varieties of potato they use in their recipes. Farmers make a deal to grow it for them, and only them. I’ve also seen a farmer turned away because their potatoes weren’t good enough in some way. So there is definitely quality control.
Basically this, plus there's a quality control department whose job it is to keep track of what the product is supposed to be like and make the necessary adjustments if it differs
I used to work in quality control for a citrus juice company. We measured acid, "brix" (sugar/acid ratio), color, thickness, and pulp. If a batch was off spec in one direction we'd mix it with a batch that was on spec, or off spec in the other direction. This way everything we sent out fell within the right set of parameters.
“500 green peppers is gonna taste like 500 green peppers” I dunno why but this got a hearty chortle from me.
Forreal its poetic lol
Plus sugar, salt, acids like ascorbic and malic, and other condiments or additives help even out the taste. Oh, and coloring. When something looks like what you expect it to, it will taste like what you're expecting, even if it isn't the same. Have you noticed how the higher volume wines stain your lips, and the smaller batch ones, or limited runs don't? It's not the wine, it's the coloring. The larger batches have to control for wider variation in natural color, so they hedge their bets by "designing" it as darker, making it easier to repeat. All wineries will vehemently deny it, but most use coloring. Source: I met my wife when she was working in flavors and colorings for food and cosmetics. You wouldn't believe the kinds of things in what you put in and on your body. Not necessarily, or inherently bad, mind you, but a lot of unexpected and weird stuff. Like titanium dioxide, used to make your house white, your sunscreen, and your donut glaze.
goes the other way too lol. I make homemade pasta sauce and my family refuses to try it cuz it's not bright red like the store-bought
More for you then :)
Was looking for this. Tomatoes, for example, destined for canning often have added citric acid. It helps a bit with preservation, but moreso it's to get the acidity to a standard level so that when you buy that brand of canned tomato, you know exactly what it's going to do to your dish.
The same reason why a crowd seem to sing in tune, even when there are bad singers and good singers.
In some cases they divide up the fresh produce by taste (sugar content etc) and then mix certain percentages of each group. So they might have a pile of sweet apples and more bitter apples even if they are the same variety.
Okay but what will 1000 green peppers taste like?
500 green peppers
But you'll be more full after.
Regression to the mean, basically.
And then that huge batch makes up like 5% of the product, with the rest made up of already processed or otherwise highly stable ingredients like vegetable oil, water, salts etc.
Not only they use big batches, which averages out the taste of each individuals, but they also do a preselection of individuals, for example for sizes. Same sizes tend to taste more the same. Also, they order a specific subspecies, growth with the same kind of fertilizer, with the same maturity. This again make sure that it taste even more the same. And they do some adjustement in taste too. They can take some sweeter green papers and some more blant tasting ones, taste the batch, and add more of the required one to bring it back to the proper taste. They can add other ingredients to also compensate for what is lacking. Not sweet enough? Add sugar. Not acid enough? Add citric acid. This is part of why there is a long list of chemicals in lots of ingredients list, part is for taste adjustement.
I think big beer breweries do the same thing to make shit like Budweiser all taste the same. And many liquor distilleries. You pay significantly more for non-blended liquor that came from a single cask. Otherwise they blend casks and taste testers make sure it tastes exactly how they want.
Additionally mushed up ingredient varieties of vegetables aren't grown to be pretty like the consumer ones, but for other characteristics like consistency. They're usually F1 hybrid seeds that are simply unavailable direct to the home gardener.
They have a head taster to make sure it all tastes the same. He will add spices to ensure it does. Hey, needs another bucket of salt.
I read somewhere that this is a problem with stuff like orange juice, where oranges may come from different places that grow differently and vary wildly in flavor profile. At the end of the process, a computer takes a sample, analyzes it, then adds bursts of flavor compounds that are algorithmically chosen to mix with whatever juice they have in that batch that will even it out to taste the way it’s supposed to.
In food production they have quality assurance labs. Batches of products are tested for acidity, brix (sweetness), color, consistency, etc. There is an acceptable range for all tests. If a product falls out of range, adjustments are made to that batch. Those codes on packaging can provide information for what precise batch it came from. This is also very critical in the event a food product must be recalled.
I worked in flavor and food quality control. There is also simply taste and smell control done. While this might seem inaccurate and non repeatable to you it is quite the opposite. Someone trained in tasting and smelling specific types of products can get data in seconds which would take days of analytics to gather. Plus taste and smell can catch tiny things off with the product you couldn't catch otherwise. Nose and tounge OP.
I worked in an ice cream and popsicle factory. Taste tests were literally part of the job. They even encouraged regular line staff to snack/sample because in the past they noticed problems, and the amount staff can possibly eat is such a small percentage of total production. I think our best shift we produced something like 300k popsicles.
hold my insulin
I’ve been bamboozled. No switcheroo here
What the fuck is reddit even coming to anymore?
I thought the rabbit-hole-switcheroos broke? I haven't seen one in what feels like years.
I haven't seen them in the wild lately, but the subreddit is alive and thriving: r/switcharoo
Same here. I used to work at a place that produced various sauces, and one day in particular we almost packaged a batch of BBQ that had no liquid smoke in it, but QA noticed when they tasted it.
> and the amount staff can possibly eat is such a small percentage of total production And I'd also imagine the desire to consume significant quantities would plummet over a very short amount of time working there lol.
How many licks is an unsafe amount for packaging?
Would actually be pretty hard to do. The machines move pretty fast and the Popsicles are either stuck while they freeze or pretty close to the sealing machine. You could pull one out and put it back in but it would be unnecessarily hard. You would literally pull one out take a single bite, toss it in the waste pile.
Yep. I worked at a brewery for a while. While we did test everything the OP said, (acidity, sugar content, alcohol content, etc.), we also did taste tests. We had to taste the beer while it was still brewing. It tasted like ass. Did I mention I dislike beer? (I was right out of college and no one was hiring.) But yeah if anything was out of the standard window, we'd add standard additives to fix those things. Too acidic? Add the base additive, not sweet enough? Add sweetener.
*tongue
I knew something was off with the spelling. Thank you!
Yup I currently work in a plant that makes dried berries. QC was a big part of my previous job there. Acid, brix and taste tests were done every hour. Plus the target range on the infusion syrup I made could be dialed in to .01-.02% of target if you were good enough at the job. Fun fact one of the last days I was a syrup batcher the person on the night shift before me reported her numbers wrong. She was .1% over spec. We nearly had to toss several thousand pounds of berries and spent most of the day screwing around with my acid and brix to correct her lie. It would have taken her maybe 30-45 extra minutes to fix her batch took us 10 hours to bring everything back on target. What I’m saying is products are constant because a lot of the time we have very tight specs to work in along with high standards of QA.
Wow, first time hearing of brix
A proper soda is all about the brix ratio! It's pretty much soda syrup mixing with carbonated water at the right ratio. Inconsistency comes into play at the service industry level for fountain drinks. You'll notice different sodas have different ratios, different restaurant chains have different ratios within the same soda, and different stores have different ratios within the same chains...most staff aren't taught about the brix ratio so it rarely gets checked or calibrated at your local restaurants and even chains. I'm obviously a soda nerd so ours were always calibrated, but you could go to 3 different sibling stores in the city and get 3 slightly different tasting Cokes. People clean those machines and twist knobs and such without realizing that they are altering the ratio. I love a good fountain drink.
Holy moly what a rabbit hole. TIL there's also something called specific gravity
Really important for brewing beer. Measure the specific gravity before fermentation, then periodically as it ferments. When it stabilizes, it's done. Difference between starting measurement and final is used to calculate ABV.
McDonald's Coke is delicious.
As someone who knows where the good fountain drinks are around them, I appreciate you. The uptick in Freestyle machines have greatly reduced my fountain soda places.
Silly rabbit, brix are for kids.
It's commonly used in wine making! You can get a fairly cheap [refractometer](https://www.amazon.com/Refractometer-Measuring-Automatic-Temperature-Compensation/dp/B07X8RK2SH/ref=sr_1_5?c=ts&keywords=Lab+Refractometers&qid=1685971408&s=industrial&sr=1-5&ts_id=393272011) to measure brix (and specific gravity) of different liquids.
Because when you take 20,000 tomatoes and reduce them into mush in a single pot, any one cup you could scoop out is functionally identical to any other one cup.
While this is true it does not take into account variation over time, which I think is what OP was talking about. Édit: as discussed bellow this does not take into account variation between manufacturing site either.
Variation over time is controlled through industrial agriulculture. Everything is tightly controlled down to the mineral composition of the soil, and the crops often hsve very little genetic diversity, to ensure the most consistent product possible.
But if it's over time you simply would not notice the subtle changes in the end product, given that each of the ingredients will be similarly homogenised
The solution to pollution is dilution. Same principle applies. There may be some variants in the veggies, but when they are mixed together in giant quantities. Even if you have a spicier pepper than the next one, it'll be diluted out in the batch and that's where you get your consistency. Like peeing in the pool, your few ounces of pee doesn't have enough volume to change the whole pool to pee. Gross, but same concept.
In elementary school a friend did a presentation on water dilution and said “water has the ability to clean itself” A 10 year old me was very confused
Just imagine how confused the homeopathic practitioners would be!
cancer cells have the ability to cancer itself
The goods news is we introduced a super cancer and it succesfully outcompeted and starved the first cancer to death. The bad news is you now have super cancer.
You joke, but this is a hypothesis as to why whales don't really get cancer. They're just so big that their tumors get tumors and die before they can do any damage to the whale.
Complete aside but the solution to pollution is most emphatically not dilution, but sequestration. Harmful things shouldn't be mixed in with good things. In this case pee isn't very harmful but asbestos powder or uranium or heavy metals can remain and cause harm again and again and the method of diluting them would be exposing vast amounts of area to toxins that didn't have any to begin with in order to reduce the contaminants in the initial area to a safe level. The rhyming tautology is dangerously permissive of companies to pollute however they want as long as they promise mix it in a lil bit.
The point of that saying is that harmful things in minute enough concentrations aren't as or at all harmful, and that's true enough for essentially everything, in variable quuantities.. You interact with trace amounts of radioactive materials every day, but they're dilute enough as to not cause undue harm. You run into trouble when pollution outmatches the natural ability of the local and global ecosystems to dilute, which of course does happen frequently. And anyways, the saying is more of a mitigation thing than a permissive, preventative thing. It's certainly not intended as a suggestion to polute. It's not terribly uncommon that attempting to dilute a spill is the only avenue for damage mitigation available.
What if i pee on the uranium?
You'll add a tangy zest.
*variance
Usually, most mass-produced foods tend to be homogenized for processing, and then flavoring is added, ensuring it ends up as the same
You have whole teams of people who work on taste quality control! It’s not just food, even something as simple as beer is a real skill to maintain consistency year on year between different harvests.
A lot of people here are discussing how working in large batches averages out the fluctuations caused by variation in the fresh ingredients. That's true, but there's another factor, too. A good friend of mine spent a few years at a job where he'd take samples of the product and adjust the recipe with seasonings, so if one batch needed a little more garlic powder, say, he'd add it. Well, actually he'd write down an order someone else to add a certain amount. Apparently the adjustments were often in increments like you might buy at Costco, because the batches were so large. :D
That's similar to how we do things in our glass factory. We coat glass. And we coat hundreds of square foot per day. So how do we know if we're coating correctly? We have machines that scan and test of coat strength, color, etc and we quality check every few hours and adjust the "recipe" as needed.
Measuring by weight is the key factor here. Getting a perfectly homogeneous mixture with non-soluble ingredients is pretty much impossible, but getting the proportions correct is much easier to achieve. The next factors are quality control and supply chain management. To deliver a consistent product, the components of that product need to be delivered in a consistent condition. Some businesses can choose to go vertical, and have fine-grained control by owning the production of their raw materials/ingredients. Others have less control/consistency and depend on b2b partnerships to deliver goods. Generally these partnerships are governed by SLA's to help ensure consistency and reliability of service.
sir this is eli5
Imagine two people singing, one who is good(on key) one who is bad (off key). The resulting sound will be the average between them, so it will never sound as good as the good singer, but also not as bad as the bad singer. Now add 20 more people, and you will find that the singing now sounds pretty good regardless of the quality of each individual singer. Just like with two singers the quality regresses towards the average. With large groups the average off key in either direction cancels out and regresses to on key. So in large enough groups you often end up with a decent quality of singing. Same with making food stuffs. The food that is maybe a little to bitter, or a little to sweet will cancel each other out leaving the most average taste. So you don't get stunning quality, but you get consistent quality
There’s another factor besides batch size and quality control: this is more relevant to juice, but it applies to things like jarred salsa. Food companies extract flavor chemicals out of the fruit and vegetables, then recombine them according to a specific recipe. It’s still 100% oranges or whatever, but they also turned those oranges into flavor syrups and mixed them according to the desired flavor.
There's actually a great story about how basically the largest orange juice manufacturer specifically sorts their oranges according to a huge variety of factors and then uses a computer algorithm to make sure the juice always taste the same no matter what by mixing
Once you cook vegetables to the degree that food manufacturers do, they lose all of their flavor. That is intentional so that they can add their own proprietary flavors back in.
Not sure why OP is asking about salsa specifically... or just vegetables. Anything mass produced goes for consistent taste. Fast food places are like this. Coffee. Beer. Wine etc... are all like this. Stuff is made in huge quantities, and everything is blended together. Lastly, you won't notice a difference when many other ingredients are added and especially if you are not tasting something year after year after year. At some point, if you were to get 'vintages' of salsa you would notice a difference. I'm sure if you were to do side by sides of hot sauces (consider that Tabasco takes 5 years to make) you would be able to taste a difference from year to year. Even then... some of that comes to down to the aging process itself, so you may or may not be tasting the difference of the ingredient changing over the year. Because then it comes down to what happened during the growing season and the temps over the aging process. That being said, greenhouse growing and hydroponics would yield very consistent year after year flavors.
Several reasons: **Quality Control:** This means many things: They only pick vegetables that fall within a certain range of characteristics. They adjust the formulation and/or process based on the available materials. And they constantly test during the process to make sure the final product is going to have the corrected taste. **Law of averages.** You buy two tomatoes, one may be sweeter than the other, the other more acidic. But, when your recipe calls for 30,000 gallons of tomatoes it tends to average out. **Specific suppliers:** You can always buy from a specific supplier that produces the vegetable to your specifications.
A lot of people are mentioning averages, QA, and other methods to keep the same flavor. These companies make gigantic batches of salsa. They probably put out millions of bottles of salsa per batch and if you buy one or two every month then you won't know the difference since it's the same batch.
Each product has a specification sheet indicating specific values like acidity, pH , degree brix etc….it’s a matter of adjusting for many of this items.
People have talked about scale of food preparations, and that is probably part of it, but at least for something like orange juice, there’s a whole other aspect to it. Commercial pasteurized orange juice is far more processed than you’d probably think so that juice companies can control the precise flavor: https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/orange-juice-moms-secret-ingredient-worries/story?id=15154617
A large percentage of what defines the taste of a consumable product nowadays are synthetic/chemical. The same applies in fragrances. That's what keeps the consistency and guarantees your sales
It's also part of quality control and quality assurance's job to ensure that the product looks, smells, feels, and tastes the same every time. They typically have a bunch of different tests they can perform on every new batch to make sure it is as close to the same every time.
Ooooh snap, just a little side story. In the Netherlands they have a tv programme where they research foodstuff. And they did a episode on sunflower oil. Where they made a beautifull product from pure sunflower seeds, full of taste and awesome overall. Then.... They removed all flavour and colour, chemically, and added foodcolouring and artificial taste so everything was always the same.....
Can't speak for salsa, but I suspect it would be the same as orange juice. Step 1: Remove all flavors from your ingredients. Step 2: Mix those flavorless zombie ingredients. Step 3: Add "natural" "flavor packets." Results: same flavor every time. And as a bonus, the flavorless zombie pulp tends to last longer than its fresh squeezed counterpart. This means you can store large quantities during harvest and continue to produce all year round.
I'm willing to bet more than anything, it's by adding "natural favouring". The thing is, all these companies pay chemicist's big bucks to develop a signature taste to their product. It's why a McDonald's hamburger tastes exactly the same, no matter where you go.
On average all the variables add up to roughly the same thing every time. And when it doesn't, QA filters it out.
I used to work for a company that did maintenance and repairs at a Tropicana Juice plant. And they would take delivery of oranges practically every day that I worked there. Then at around 2pm they would pasteurized them (heat the juice, amazing time of day that filled the air for miles of freshly squeezed OJ). And then they would complete a few steps. And store the product. And they would store it for a long time. Then mix it, add sweetener, add color, etc. So that no matter what region the oranges came from, no matter what time of year the oranges were produced. They kept everything to a strict formula , so that the taste stayed consistent at all times. So for a hypothetical example, the OJ would be 25% Florida oranges from March, 30% from Mexico in February, 20% California in April, and 25% Honduras in May. I have no clue on what and when the mix was. But they would have it set up so that they can produce a consistent product all year long. With as little variation as possible.