Why are you standing in hot ketchup in your stocking feet?

It seems like every time I think of my days in industry, I remember a lot of funny, strange, weird things that happened. I’m guessing that everyone remembers these types of events, and I think that they would make interesting blogs. I’ll start it off, but how about some of the rest of you chiming in. If you have a good story, but you don’t want to be identified, send me the story in an e-mail, and I’ll run it with no name on it. 

I was a project engineer at Kraft in the early 1970s, and I was assigned a project to install form/fill/seal machines to run condiment pouches. As I recall, they wanted to run nine or ten products, including ketchup. We got a new product manager half way through the project who decided we should also run vinegar, which, as you can imagine, really screwed things up, but that’s another story. This was the first time we were really getting into these products, so I had a clean slate, and I finally selected continuous vertical machines from a new, small company named Circle Design in NJ. This was a major project. I bought six machines, and the engineer who took over the project, when I left Kraft, bought a bunch more. The machines ran 10 lanes of pouches continuously with rotary sealers on the edges and between lanes. Product was pumped through long nozzles that extended down into the pouches. One of the owners of Circle, a great guy named Mario Natelli, was was responsible for startup and training. He and I spent a lot nights together in plants over the next year.

Anyway, the first two machines were installed in the Kraft plant in Champaign, IL. After the usual checkout and testing, we went full blast on ketchup. I had run across an ad in a magazine for a company called Haband that was offering two pair of shoes for about $5. They sounded great for in the plant, so I bought them. I had them on when we started running the ketchup. The first problem was that the ketchup was hot; it was filled at about 180 deg F. The second problem was that for the first hour, we had ketchup squirting everywhere. So we had about an inch of hot ketchup on the floor. My feet started feeling uncomfortable, but so much was happening that I didn’t pay any attention, and then one of the operators started pointing at me and laughing. I finally caught on, and when I looked down, I saw that I was standing in my stocking feet and the tops of the shoes were up around my ankles. There was no sign of the soles. It turned out that the soles had been glued onto the shoes, and the hot ketchup dissolved the glue, so the soles fell off. Of course, everyone at the plant knew about this within a half hour after it happened, and I was major celebrity when I walked into the lunch room.

“To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder.” 

– Louis L’Amour