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Hanover: Snack Food Capital
By Tony Porco
Jan 29, 2006, 23:57
HANOVER: SNACK FOOD CAPITAL
By Tony Porco
The countryside around the small industrial city of Hanover, Pennsylvania is quite beautiful and bucolic. This is especially true in the fall, when the colors make you wonder why Washingtonians travel to more distant places like Vermont or upstate New York to see autumn leaves. The winter is gorgeous too, with bare trees forming a minimal cover over white hills. The downtown area, while not exactly full of life, is still thriving compared to many others in the state, with retail and restaurants still surviving. There is plenty of history in the area, although the Civil War history is by far the best known, with Gettysburg a few miles to the west. Codorus State Park, a little-known attraction dominated by a large and beautiful lake, sprawls out in the opposite direction.
All of these traits are pleasant enough, but none of them are reasons to stop for long in Hanover by themselves. There is one overriding reason to linger: the snack food, especially the pretzels. Hanover’s hometown industry is (perhaps not surprisingly) also its most unique draw, but this is not obvious to anyone passing through who doesn’t know it already. This town has earned the right to be called the snack capital of America, but there is no tacky fifteen-foot-tall pretzel or garish road sign proclaiming this title. Hanover is an unpretentious place, and that makes it more endearing.
The two real monuments to Hanover’s distinction are, of course, the Utz and Snyder’s factories, complete with their requisite outlet stores. Both Utz and Snyder’s are well-known to super-marketers on the East Coast, but Jill and I hoped to find more than bargains on the familiar. We hoped to find a unique treat, something you had to come to this modest city to get. (Our interest was also piqued by my wife Jill’s great love of pretzels!) This seemed like a good criterion to compare the two arch snack-rivals, or at least their outlets.
The Snyder’s factory, just outside of town on the road that goes northeast to York, is a large, windowless rectangle of slightly brownish concrete with rounded edges. It’s not much to look at, until you laugh and realize how much it resembles a big pile of dough.
If the factory doesn’t stimulate the sense of sight, it definitely encourages the olfactory nerves. The moment we stepped out of our cars, we were hit with a strong smell of pretzel dough in the oven that rivaled flowers in sweetness. I have been in lots of company towns all over the country that smelled of their industries, but Hanover may be my favorite, anywhere. It is often said that smell is the sense most vividly remembered; the Snyder’s factory almost seems to have been set up to prove this idea beyond any shadow of a doubt.
Inside, the outlet came stocked with broken pretzels and other factory seconds, plus rather ordinary hats and t-shirts with the Snyder’s logo. It was still heaven for a pretzel lover, however. A whole shelf was devoted to sourdough “nibblers” of every flavor--cheddar cheese, honey mustard, and plenty of lesser-known kinds like jalapeno, buttermilk, and garlic bread. On an opposite shelf was a compilation of Pennsylvania Dutch treats a shopper could spend a year in farmer’s markets gathering-- candies, sugar-roasted peanuts, and our personal favorite, pretzel-bites filled with peanut butter and covered with chocolate, truly an embarrassment of riches. Among all these options, the most unique treat in the house was undoubtedly the pretzel dip. This rather American treasure is, to our knowledge, only found in the Snyder’s store. This strong, cheddary cheese, something like Cheese Whiz (but never letting you forget that it is cheese), seems to have been made to be creamy enough to spread but viscous enough to stay on your pretzel. With a hard sourdough, the kind that comes in two-foot-high plastic barrels here at the outlet, this is an absolute delicacy, although not something for people concerned about their salt intake. As if this weren’t enough, it comes in mild and jalapeno flavors, and in small pint jars and gallon-size tins (for the real fanatics, apparently!).
New ideas, and discarded ones, were also on exhibit here. A large display of caramel pretzels in green boxes with Chinese lettering seemed to represent an idea that didn’t quite make it over there (and probably wouldn’t make it here either, although the experiment remains for the curious to try). On the other hand, a new display of organic pretzel relatives looked promising. We tried the organic bread sticks with honey-mustard baked into them, and they were incredible, with just the right mix of sweetness and salt. Surprisingly, these organic pretzels are not found anywhere but here; even stores that specialize in organics, like Fresh Fields, do not carry them. This was only one of many reasons why we concluded that a visit to the Snyder’s outlet justified a trip to Hanover.
Unlike the Snyder’s factory, which hovers at the edge of town, Utz’s headquarters is only a few blocks north of downtown, surrounded by other factories and company-town housing. Another difference is Utz’s lack of character compared with its rival--no intense smells, no funny architecture (although the facade of the company store has a great art-deco touch). This is all the more surprising, since Utz’s facility is the one that is actually billed as an attraction--the AAA guide recommends stopping in the factory and taking the tour to see how pretzels are made.
The tours happen at Utz’s convenience, not at the visitor’s--the hours are basically business hours, with no tour on Fridays when production slows down. The tour is self-guided, and starts with visitors seeing a few displays of photographs, product packages, and company-related antiques. The best of these are old Utz chip tins, including one unusual tin with a glass lid, so that potential buyers could be enticed by the pretzels themselves. There’s also a movie relating company history and dogma, but visitors aren’t required to view it, which is good, since the small theater in which it is shown had only two chairs in it when we were there. The real meat of the tour is in the next room, which is actually a hallway with large glass observation windows running along the ceiling of the Utz factory, processing room, and warehouse. This is quite fascinating; just follow the hallway, and you can see the potatoes being washed, peeled, sorted, sliced, salted, run through various machines and conveyors, bagged, boxed, and finally loaded onto trucks for distribution. The employees are congenial, and pause occasionally to wave at children taking the tour, who can stand on platforms to get a good view through the windows (my son appreciated this). There are speakers along the hallway with narration that explains the process, but on the day we were there, they were hard to hear above the children, the factory noise, and the other visitors. My favorite visual from the tour was a huge hopper full of cleaned, cooked chips waiting to be shaken onto the belt that leads them to the chutes through which they tumble into the bags. You just don’t see a three-foot-tall and ten-foot-wide pile of potato chips every day of your life. Those who are understandably hungry after this may take a free sample on the way out.
Not surprisingly, the company tries hard to get the people who come for the tour to drive the short distance to the factory outlet. Like the one at Snyder’s, it did not disappoint, although we found differences between the two. While the Snyder’s store has a variety of Pennsylvania-oriented treats and snack foods made by other companies, the Utz store is more specialized, focusing on Utz’s own products. Fortunately, these are many and varied, including not just the signature potato chips, but also pretzels, cheese curls (and their close cousins, the dreaded cheese balls), and Cape Cod, a gourmet brand of potato chip often found in delis. While we were there, the store also offered fresh roasted peanuts in paper bags, each filled to the brim and stapled shut. There are some chip tins with the Utz logo on them, but they aren’t anywhere near as interesting as the souvenir tins stacked up in the back of the store. These offer a wide selection of Americana images (puppies, American flags, small-town churches, and so on), which are either entertaining of kitschy, depending on your point of view.
The perfect place to end the snack-food tour of Hanover is in the nearby town of Spring Grove, Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes’ drive east of Snyder’s on Route 116. The town’s main business is the foul-smelling but economically important Glatfelter Paper Company; its odor can’t be missed from Route 116 on the way into town. We kept going, however, and soon arrived at something a lot more pleasant–the aptly named Papertown Diner, on the right side of 116 as it heads out of town on the other side. The place has all the usual diner stuff–hamburgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, and so on–along with some delicious fried vegetables, the best of which is the cauliflower in a light breading. Since this is a snack food tour, we had to try the peanut butter milkshake, and we weren’t disappointed–it’s fantastic and unique, and it put a smile on my son’s face that was worth the trip all by itself. We left the place with cups in hand, knowing that we’d be coming back a lot.
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