A century of twists, dunks and licks
The iconic Oreo turns 100 today and we get a rare glimpse at how the cookie is made
MONTREAL— In the middle of a city renowned for its bagels, an unassuming yellow brick factory across from Olympic Park churns out 1 billion Oreo cookies each year for Canadians.
That works out to 1.1 million cookies during every eight-hour shift or, to break it right down, 3,000 cookies a minute. Oreo, the world’s top-selling cookie, turns 100 on Tuesday. To celebrate, Kraft Canada created a limited edition birthday cake-flavoured variety featuring rainbow sprinkles in the vanilla cream and a golden package. And, for the first time, it opened its Canadian factory to the media.
Plant manager Michel Cartier patiently leads a day full of private, hour-long tours for those who shed their jewellery and don safety shoe slip-ons, hair nets, ear plugs and lab coats.
The tour guests look just like employees.
“We are protecting the cookies from us,” explains Cartier. The Manhattan-born Oreo may be an iconic American cookie with 25 million Facebook fans, but it’s also simply a chocolate sandwich cookie with a layer of cream that people love to “twist, lick and dunk” in milk.
There is no “Caramilk secret” to protect in this Kraft Canada plant, so Cartier gladly reveals that each 12-gram cookie is made up of two 4-gram biscuits and 4 grams of cream filling.
Of the plant’s 500 employees, 125 work the Oreo line. There are three Oreo shifts a day, and 25 people per shift.
It takes 90 minutes to make an Oreo and the action starts on the ground flour of the sterile Viau St. factory with the deafening din of machinery.
Sugar, flour, coconut oil, cocoa, baking soda and water go into an industrial mixer for 18 minutes to create a 937-kilogram tub of dough that will make 120,000 cookies.
At “the dumper,” the dough is broken into crumbs, transferred by conveyor belt to a molder, and pressed into a biscuit embossed with the word Oreo and 12 ornate flowers. Each biscuit will be precisely 45-millimetres wide and 4.7 millimetres high.
“We have very strict specifications for every cookie,” explains Cartier, adding that they call the biscuit a “base cake,” the filling the “crème” or “cream,” and the finished product the “cookie.”
Next the “base cakes” travel through an 85-metre long, windowless oven for about six minutes in temperatures that average 400F (200C), creating a heady scent of warm chocolate.
The warm biscuits travel by conveyor belt up to the factory’s second floor, where half are left facing up- ward and the rest are flipped so they can be filled.
It takes 25 minutes to mix two, 361-kilogram tubs of Oreo cream (a.k.a. crème) from icing sugar, oil and vanilla. The cream, enough to fill 100,000 cookies, is fed into “a filler” so the Oreos can be quickly and precisely “sandwiched.”
“The base cake is still warm so it melts a little bit and sticks together,” says Cartier.
More conveyor belts take the cookies onto the tray loading and inspection station, where a human hunts for problems like broken cookies and a metal detector ensures nothing has fallen in with the cookies.
The cookies are packed into plastic trays and then into three-layer bags featuring a printed label, plastic film, and cardboard carton.
The royal blue bags are sealed, fitted with a tin tie, folded and sent to the warehouse to be loaded into cases and shipped coast-to-coast. “These are for you — the freshest ones,” says Cartier with a flourish, handing over a bag with a “best before” date of six months minus three days. “We’re very proud that we produce this in Montreal for all Canadians.”
There are 21 Oreo factories in the world. The iconic cookie is sold in more than 100 countries.
There are 21 Oreo factories in the world. Global Oreo sales topped $2 billion last year and the cookie is sold in more than 100 countries. Canada is the fourth biggest market after the United States, China and Venezuela. Countries experiment with flavours and recipes. China, for in- stance, has green tea Oreos. Canada favours coconut and soybean oil while the United States prefers palm oil. Oreos are made by Nabisco in the U.S. and Christie up here. Fans also customize their Oreo experiences. An unscientific poll during our tour reveals five people with five different Oreo rituals. Cartier eats his cookies quite simply while drinking milk. Stephanie Cass, Kraft Canada’s manager of corporate affairs, says she twists her cookies open, eats one biscuit, licks the cream, eats the second biscuit, and then drinks a glass of milk. Emmanuelle Voirin, Kraft’s senior product manager for core/kids cookies, twists open her Oreos, licks the cream and dunks the biscuits in milk. Explains Voirin: “The twist, lick and dunk is a way to slow down.” jbain@thestar.ca