Going Nuts for Beatrice FruitcakeThe town that saved its factory now sends a million pounds of cakes to fans across North America every year. Story by Matthew Spencer |
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THEY LINED UP TOGETHER with uniforms on, ready for the warm-up exercises. The leader stands before the squad, poised to direct their movements. And then they begin. The team follows the leader. Arms twirl this way, then that way. They reach up. Then down. Twist to the right. Stretch to the left. Bend forward, pull back. Dozens of hands shake loose the stiffness from the day.
No, it’s not the Big Red Cornhuskers doing their gridiron calisthenics, but this is one dedicated team. They are the ladies of the Beatrice Bakery, and it’s time to make the fruitcakes, about 1 million pounds in less than a year. So, just before the morning work begins, nearly 30 women put on their white aprons and smocks and hair nets and loosen up. It is the Beatrice ritual that rivals tai chi on a Beijing square.
Lynn Stevens has been helping bake the fruitcakes for 26 years now, and it’s estimated that she’s made about 20 million pounds of them in her career here. The 64-year-old Beatrice resident still insists she has an easy job, but she does welcome the 8 a.m. workout, when they shake shake shake before they bake bake bake.
“We get our aprons and get ready,” Stevens said. “We stretch our arms, our backs. Then roll our shoulders and wrists.”
After their morning stretch, Team Fruitcake springs into action. It’s a revolving assembly line worthy of Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory. One worker secretly measures the top-secret formula for the mixing man, who stirs and stirs until the mix is just right. With the strength of a mighty blacksmith, he hoists the vat and pours its 600-pound batch into a hefty machine called a dough trough.
“Our mixing man, he’s nutty as a fruitcake,” chuckles Greg Leech, who is the company’s president and CEO.
Leech, who turns 55 in November, has been with the company for 31 years, and he’s heard all of the fruitcake jokes, many of them from his new mixing man.
Larry Hibbert started the heavy lifting at the bakery a few months ago, but for years, he tossed the light fruitcake barbs at Leech when they watched their kids playing sports together in Beatrice.
“Now he works here, so now he doesn’t tease me anymore,” Leech said, laughing. Leech is one of six local investors who bought the company and saved it from being closed down in 2001.
When Hibbert puts the batter up, it kicks off a chain reaction by the line workers. First, the batter is moved from the dough trough into the depositor, where the machine sorts the batter into 1- and 2-pound pans. A worker then places the pans on a scale and either subtracts or adds batter to get the right weight.
After one worker smoothes the creamy batter, another group gets the delicate task of topping off the cakes with walnuts from California, Georgia pecans and cherries from Oregon. Still other workers hand-sort the nuts – about 3,000 pounds a week – to make sure shells are out of the mix.
After all the fixin’s are fixed, it’s time for Stevens to get cooking. The cakes are wheeled over to her on seven carts, with 20 pans to a cart. She puts each cake pan into the oven.
After the cakes are baked at about 300 degrees for around two hours, they’re placed back on the carts and cooled overnight. In the morning, they are packaged for delivery to the customers all over North America. The University of Nebraska tests the shelf life for Beatrice, and the cakes are counted on to keep for a year.
Beatrice’s biggest seller is its Grandma’s Original Fruit & Nut Cake, which contains a healthy dose of bourbon, rum and brandy. Beatrice uses about 5,000 gallons of booze in its fruit and nut and liqueur cakes each year, which makes it the champion consumer of liquor in the state.
Leech won’t reveal the secret behind the taste of the Beatrice fruitcakes, but he does say that the slow baking, and then the cooling through the air-conditioned room keeps their cakes moister than those infamous Christmas gifts everyone dreads getting in the mail. Rebecca Brown, who is director of sales and marketing, often deals with fruitcake requests from all over the United States, as well as Canada and Puerto Rico, and she has a theory why people go nuts for these high-end cakes. Beatrice doesn’t throw in what Brown terms as “foreign objects,” like citron and orange peels. “One will not find that chewy texture and bitter aftertaste in our fruitcackes,” she said.
“Even though people say fruitcake lasts forever, the fruitcake that we make, people actually consume,” Brown added. “It’s not a doorstop.”
