While on vacation we happened to be very close to the company that makes all of our glass milk bottles. So we arranged for the "grand tour" of their facility on Tuesday. It was about a 45 minute drive from downtown Niagara Falls. We toured the plant and could not believe how our bottles are processed! This company is the only glass milk bottle distributor in North America, so we were expecting this enormous plant with state-of-the-art machinery...NOT at all what we found. It is a rather small family owned facility with about 100 employees, that work very old machinery, all the labeling on the bottles is done one at a time, and then the bottles are put thru an "oven" to bake the words and pictures onto the bottles, then the bottles are packed back into boxes for shipping by-hand, if you want handles on the bottles that is done by a person who can put 9 handles on at a time. It was just mind boggling! No wonder the darn things are so expensive!
Anyway, we knew we were running low on bottles back home, but Wednesday morning we got the call while at breakfast, that we ran out of half gallon bottles and did not have enough to run the production for the day. So Tony put the call into Stanpac that very morning, telling them to rush ship 5200 plain bottles to us. They arrived at 6:00 pm last night, if we had a truck we could have brought them home ourselves!
It was neat to see the production from start to finish and then have our bottles arrive a few days later. It gives us a new respect for our special business that we run!
