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There aren’t food prep areas when it comes to manufacturing at this scale. There are silos, storage tanks, essentially duct work to transport ingredients from bulk storage to production, and large-scale machinery which is designed to minimize exposure to the environment and people while in use. That’s putting aside the equipment and facilities used to acquire ingredients or store products after production.

Yes, all of this equipment is also designed to be cleaned and sanitized, but these are large surface areas covering large distances. And we’re talking about one little sesame seed which can’t be easily detected if it somehow makes its way into a product, unlike, say, the metal detectors all finished goods pass through to ensure no metal object found its way into something.

Spending time in facilities like Bimbo operates will disavow someone of the idea that the work a company like that does is akin to what happens in restaurants or catering facilities. These are factories where product assembly happens to involve edible parts.

4 comments

Thank you for the mental image of a loaf of bread getting busted trying to smuggle a machine part out of the factory.

The food industry has special industrial X-ray machines so that if the hamburger meat grinding machine has a blade snap off, you don't send a customer a hamburger with a blade in it.

You joke but product theft is always a major concern.

So we're saying what, in an era of atomic scale manufacturing it isn't possible to design a manufacturing line that segregates macro-scale ingredients? I've spent time in pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities. They don't routinely floof active ingredients between capsule lines. Corraling shit the size of a sesame seed is trivial in comparison. So yeah, this is still bullshit.

> They don't routinely floof active ingredients between capsule lines

But isn’t that what we read about regarding athletes being acused of cheating because of cross contamination in pharmaceutical manufacturing?

“Generic Pharmaceuticals as a Source of Diuretic Contamination in Athletes Subject to Sport Drug Testing”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8635962/

It’s entirely possible, all you need is a separate factory to make products for 0.3% of the population, in every geographical region you bake bread in.

The reason they aren’t doing it is cost, not practicality.

Aren't the two basically synonymous? Cost is a proxy for the amount of effort put into it.

Possible, yes. Economical, no.

Uneconomical to corral macroscopic ingredients several orders of magnitude larger than dust? I'm unconvinced although I'm certain that's the line of rhetoric being advanced by manufacturers.

I can’t wait until bread costs the same as drugs per gram. /s

I can't wait until a bread manufacturer tries to advance the argument that the same level of contamination mitigation infrastructure required to contain sub-micron active ingredient powder has to be brought to bear to keep sesame seeds from moving around at random.

> These are factories where product assembly happens to involve edible parts.

And looking at the picture of the """bread""" at the start of the article, it shows.

That's not bread, that's an industrial product.

Yes, and this is what a bakery for basic loaves of bread looks like.[1] And here's one for "artisanal" bread, from the same manufacturer.[2] Notice how similar the processes are. The "artisanal" plant has a few more stations, including a "decoration" station where the sesame seeds, etc. go on top. Artisanal plants tend to be more reconfigurable, the same line can produce a few different products.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvPTD2RF5KM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWTVkL-f91w

Interesting videos.

Probably the key thing for me is how much of the process in both videos is just exposed to normal air. If sesame is as deadly as some people in this thread are making out and a few grains of sesame dust could kill you, then absolutely the current warning labels seem justified if any loaves are made in a factory that has sesame anywhere. Perhaps there's some in the air, perhaps a worker has some dust on their clothes (which could even affect them travelling to a different factory or even location). What next? Should we demand completely sterile factories and for all the workers to wear full hazmat suits?

It does seem simpler to just allow the labeling to continue with the warning about the possibility, and people with allergies can choose to not eat bread at all, or find a baker who can offer a guaranteed sesame free product. It'll probably cost more to make that guarantee (less demand, limited product range, etc), but if people with allergies want bread so badly that it's worth paying the extra, there will be a sustainable business opportunity. Maybe only artisanal bakers will bother, maybe only those owned by people with the allergies themselves, but if there's an overlap between how much it costs to make that guarantee and how much someone is prepared to pay, somebody will make that business. But if you have an allergy, and you're not prepared to pay for what it costs to protect yourself, why you should expect everyone else to subsidise that?

I say this as someone with allergies myself. I have developed allergies to some common fruits (weirdly, ones I used to love and have eaten for most of my life) that have given me reactions ranging from itchiness to fairly severe throat swellings. I deal with that by not eating those fruits or things containing them. There's plenty of other food in the world that I can have instead.

It's because the sesame labeling law was lobbied by Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE) [0] who are funded by the National Peanut Board, the National Dairy Council, and a number of Soy product manufacturers [1].

Essentially, the sesame law made it mandatory to label for sesame like you would for Dairy, Peanuts, and Soy.

It was a blatant lobbyist attempt that backfired.

[0] - https://www.foodallergy.org/resources/how-fare-advocates-hel...

[1] - https://www.foodallergy.org/corporate-partners

Yes, almost all food these days is an "industrial product" at some point in the pipeline. That's the reality of living in an industrial society and not an agrarian one.

Not at all. Even in this industrial society it is possible to buy raw ingredients and cook yourself and many people do it.

(and as far as I know, many studies imply that is healthier, than heavily processed food, filled with conservatives, additives and whatever)

>Even in this industrial society it is possible to buy raw ingredients and cook yourself and many people do it.

Those raw ingredients are also "industrial products". Did you think that bag of flour you bought was hand-milled by someone after they hand-picked the wheat? It came from a factory, just like most store-bought bread.

Actually one can buy hand milled flour, but I do not think that makes sense. I am not against big machines (and milling has not been done by hand for centuries). I am against adding all kind of things into my food, that happened to not be proofen cancer inducing yet.

It's almost impossible to find hand-milled flour in a store or online.

You might be confusing "Stone Ground" flour which is ground using a machine [0]

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SolMVg3_Ac

I never tried to buy it myself, but I know I saw it on a organic market (in europe) advertised as such at least once. Basically, a extremely esoteric niché obviously.

Any flour you purchase was processed by Cargill, ADM, or Bunge (or on their behalf). I’m sure there’s artisan grains available for a premium price, but virtually all commodity crops are processed by the big 3 agribusinesses.

It is impossible to avoid industrial food processing unless you grow it yourself.

> There are silos, storage tanks, essentially duct work to transport ingredients from bulk storage to production

How hard would it be to just have a set of sesam free plumbing for specific products? I mean they also manage to keep a separate sewage line, right??

I don't know about Bimbo Breads specifically, but I do know a lot of manufacturing plants will produce several products on the same production line, in batches.

A brewery that produces several types of beer would have separate fermentation tanks for each one - but might only have one bottling/canning line.

I wouldn't be surprised if bread manufacturing was similar - you might produce 8 different types of bread, but only have one bagging machine.

Of course the entire plant would be deep-cleaned once per day. But you'd be switching between products 8 times per day, so there's not time for an hour-long cleaning every time.