#HLS Friday: The Fritos Tour and Party

Yesterday was first day of the Healthy Living Summit. Sorry I didn’t get a chance to post before now as I’ve been crazy busy with the evening party, sleep, running, and of course the conference itself today. More on that later (once I collect all of my thoughts).

Le Tour de FritoLay

Anyhow, yesterday was a really fun day that started with a longish bus ride to the FritoLay in Beloit Wisconsin. I know you don’t necessarily think about FritoLay when you think healthy eating but they really do have some great healthy snacks and have for years. Heck, if you look at a bag of Lays chips you see the ingredients:

You can’t get any simpler than that, 3 ingredients total … potatoes, oil, and salt.

On the tour we actually learned that the whole process from potato form into bag only takes about 15 minutes and to top that off, a lot of the potatoes that go into the bags are yanked out of the ground that morning at like 3am and make it into a bag by around 9am~ give or take transportation time. Locally grown FTW!

The people who put together and gave the tour were very friendly and knowledgeable. The tour of the factory was like 45 minutes and there is a great flickr gallery of photos. If your interested in seeing me in a hair net, safety goggles, and ear plugs … and I know you are, there are a few shots of that for posterity and a bit of humor.

A few cool things that I learned on the tour about FritoLay and the plant itself, in random order:

• The Beloit plant received the LEED Gold Certification in 2010. It’s an award given to companies that are following “Green” building practices and are working toward self sustainability. This plant actually has goals of eventually being fully self sufficient utilizing various green technologies.
• They produce 600 million bags of chips annually, those are crazy big numbers.
• They use 500,000 potatoes per day.
• They have a patent on their own potato. It’s one that can be grown with less imperfections to make better chips. I tried to kind a link to the patent but couldn’t. Anyone have a link?
• They inject nitrogen into chip bags to remove the oxygen in order to maintain the freshest taste longer. Oxygen and time causes the oil to break down faster, remove the oxygen and it breaks down slower.

Before we left everyone had to get a fun shot with Mr Cheetos himself:

On the bus ride home we played a plant trivia game. For once my anal note taking skills during presentations paid off and I won this cool Terracycle Lays backpack that my daugher is going to absolutly LOVE!

I’ll post some pics when she christens it with her toys.

We took home a absolute ton of swag from the plant. Most of the items were actually manufactured on the site, but not all.

Pretty awesome ahe? I want to thank everyone from FritoLay for giving us the tour and being such gracious hosts. They really did open my eyes to how much FritoLay is doing to make their products healthier for the consumer as well as make their plants more environmentally friendly.

The Babysitter

Our return bus was running a bit late and everyone was getting a bit concerned that they were going to miss the evenings festivities. Heck, a lot of them flew in the day before just for the party.

Like the ever concerned and highly opinionated nerd that I am, I pointed out that from where we were we’d likely be 1.5 – 2 hours (depending on traffic) … but … if we wanted to jump off at the first stop near the blue line we could catch it into the city and be at the hotel in 40~ minutes. Being a train leaving from the airport it likely wouldn’t be full this late in the day nor would it be running late.

I suggested it being a little nervous in how it would be received but our leader Catlin liked the idea of getting there on time as did most of the bus. I was of course instantly concerned that I might ruin everyones evening. Last thing I wanted was 15~ angry female bloggers the evening before the summit started … talk about bad publicity.

Fortunately fate was on our side and I made a good call. Everyone made it with ample time to change and we beat the bus by 40~ minutes. Woot! I even received a new nickname, babysitter … hehhe.

The Welcoming Party

The evening party thrown by OpenSky and was a lot of fun. It was really great meeting everyone from the conference in a casual setting where we could just chat and mingle.

I have to admit something weird though … and this happened most of the weekend for me … it was very weird and awkward walking up to everyone introducing myself. I don’t usually have trouble as I’m a pretty outgoing guy but this particular group was not only all female (98%) but they were all heath & fitness bloggers or professionals.

It was a double whammy! Heck, I’m still dealing with my own new body image and I don’t always have a ton of confidence to walk up to knowledgeable fellow bloggers to introduce myself. Do I even know what I’m doing? Sometimes I think I do, sometimes I don’t.

Again, this was totally me in my own mind … no one made me feel uncomfortable at all, actually quite the opposite. Everyone was very friendly and open and interested in getting a males perspective on things. I wanted to thank everyone for that and apologize if I was quiet or sometimes seemed shy.

The more I talked to everyone the more comfortable I became but it was far from second nature.

Anyhow, that ended the first day of the summit for me. I left around 9 when that event ended and headed back to the hotel to relax before the next day. The first day was a lot of fun and it was great to put faces & voices to some of the blogs that I read.

• An Interim Midweek Weigh-In
• ZUMBAloggin’ Over At MrsFatass’s Place
• What I’m Looking To Gain And Give To Fitbloggin
• Weigh-In Friday, Triathlon Update
• #Fitbloggin Thursday, Good And Bad Hugs