After all this time the original recipe is still closely followed. Quality control checks are important for each batch having the same Benzel’s taste. This process is estimated to take around 45 minutes and is highly automated, almost untouched by human hands. From the oven, the pretzels are inspected, packaged, and ready for delivery to a vast array of customers. Finally, the dough is baked in a 100 foot long oven. After the dough rises, the product is rinsed with a soda bath to make the outside layer crispy and is lightly salted. Next, the dough moves along the conveyor belt to the proofing line where it rises and sets. From here, automated knives cut the long dough strips into individual pieces. The dough then travels through an extruding machine where it squeezes the dough into long formulated strips. First, a mixing machine carefully blends all of the ingredients into dough. If you were able to watch how the ingredients turn into the final product, this is what you would see. Benzel’s closed its tours in 2000 as they needed extra space and because of liability and confidentiality issues.īenzel's Braids on their way to the ovens. Over 300 scheduled bus tours every year would stop by to take the tour and visit the outlet store that is connected to the bakery.ĭuring the tour, people could meander along a glass-enclosed hallway and look into the stainless steel ovens to see the pretzels being made. Most visitors travel from within Pennsylvania, as well as from neighboring Ohio and New Jersey.Īround 1975, Benzel’s attracted visitors with a self-guided factory tour which allowed visitors to get up close and personal with the pretzel making process. Altoona is an old railroad town and the caboose, as well as the factory store, draw a large number of people to the bakery when exploring the city of Altoona and its attractions such as America’s oldest roller coaster at Lakemont Park, the world-famous Horseshoe Curve and the recent Railroaders Museum. Today with global sales, the company utilizes a much more sophisticated means of transporting products which could include trucks, planes and ships.Īn authentic caboose sits in the parking lot of the factory. In Adolph’s time, a horse and wagon was followed by a motorized vehicle. This range of products and the means of transporting them have changed significantly in the 100 years since Adolph began making pretzels. “Our sticks taste different from our minis, our minis taste different from our thins,” according to the current owner, Ann Benzel. Most bakeries formulate a variety of shapes from the same basic recipe. Benzel’s is one of the few bakeries utilizing the philosophy of different recipies for different products. These young bakers from the company's early years might be amazed at the baking technology that has developed since their time.Įach of these products has its own recipe. The bakery evolved into one of the most modern pretzel bakeries in the world, a 180,000 square foot bakery that produces up to 50 million pretzels a day in different shapes and varieties: pretzel thins, pennysticks, mini pretzels, waffle pretzels, nuggets, braided pretzels, sourdough hard pretzels, penny grahams, rods, nibblers, thick sticks and thin sticks. The family recipe turned this small bakery in which the pretzels were shaped by hand into something he never imagined. He acquired a rather small building of 75 square feet with a bakery oven to start his quest. He had worked for other bakers across the state, but decided it was time to put the family recipe to use and start his own pretzel bakery. Benzel, along with his family, stepped out of a boxcar in Altoona, Blair County, in November 1911. A hundred years later, the name on the door of the family-owned business remains the same.Īdolph Benzel, an immigrant from Germany, arrived in America with an old world recipe for pretzels and a dream of establishing a bakery. When creating his own pretzel company in 1911, Adolph Benzel gave his central Pennsylvania bakery the name of Benzel’s Bretzel Bakery. Benzel's Bakery has been making pretzels in Altoona for one hundred years.īretzel is the German word for what we know as pretzel.
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