New England Visits: The Factory Workers

It’s been a week since my New England road trip and I’m just now getting around to posting about it. Partially because the rest of my life was sitting here waiting for me to catch up after being out of town, and partially because this is starting to feel more and more like just another part of my life, something that I do, and less like a crazy adventure. Though, really, when I sit back and think about it, it’s exactly both of those things.

Aspects of this excursion were planned months in advance, and some parts were completely fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants. We started by driving the 5 and half hours to southern Maine after work on Wednesday, pulling off Route 1 in The Yorks, a coastal town about an hour away from our morning appointment at the Tom’s of Maine factory in Sanford. I had scheduled myself in for the first tour of the season, 9:30 am Thursday morning. Tours of the factory only run through the summer months as they are hosted by Cindy, a first grade school teacher. She greeted us outside in the ‘herb garden’ where they grow examples of the types of herbs used to flavor their toothpastes and scent their deodorants. She then took us on an hour-long eye-opening tour of what can only be compared to the manufacturing process of Mr. Willy Wonka.

We started at the giant blenders that mix thousands of gallons of toothpaste, which is then shot through tubes along the ceiling into the room next door where six line-workers aid the laser-guided conveyor belts. Every two hours, workers shift to a new spot on the line to avoid fatigue, either right there on the toothpaste area or over onto the deodorant line. Rube Goldberg would be proud as deodorant sticks are skimmed by hair dryers (no joke, four hair dryers are perfectly positioned to blow off bubbles before the sticks are cooled and solidified) and bright orange discs which hold the sticks uprights are plucked off, carried high into the air, and roll thirty feet far above workers heads back to the start of the line.

We talked with a few of the workers, including John who has worked in the mixing room for 18 years. When he started, they were in a smaller facility in Kenebunk that was destroyed in a fire in 2004. As a rookie he was assigned the task of lifting and emptying 50lb bags of chalk into the mixers day in and out. Back then every ingredient was measured by hand and added individually. Now, massive scales and computers do most of the measuring but that hasn’t precluded getting their hands dirty. Despite hairnets, beard nets, aprons, eye goggles, and gloves, John’s family and friends can still make out what flavor he worked with that day. Nothing like going to the bank and having the teller pronounce, “Hi John, you guys mixing fennel today?”

We also spent time with the folks working on the floss packaging. Floss is the only product not made in the factory, but it is packaged and shipped there. This process is handled by a local community group home for adults with mental disabilities. We met Margaret, who is also blind, who folds together the tiny boxes, inserts the product info sheets and floss so they face the right way, and passes them to others who box and crate them for shipping. She and her housemates are right there in the middle of all the action, between the toothpaste line and the deodorant conveyor belts, all day three days a week for the past three years.

It was the first time I had ever seen how a factory works since I stopped watching Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood 25 years ago. Though it’s just another day for the folks who work there, it’s sort of wondrous to an outsider.