Regardless of where the plants are harvested, the picking and production process is the same. Pickers are issued a petit baton rouge, or little red stick. Before the pepper can be picked, its color must match the color of the stick. The peppers are crushed, mixed with salt and placed in a white oak barrel to ferment for three years. A salt cap on top of the barrel, several inches thick, protects the fermenting mash.
Gases bubble up through the cap.
If the finished mash meets muster, it's stirred and strained, then blended with high-grade vinegar, bottled and labeled. The miniature bottles produced for the MRE are run on a separate production line. An employee feeds the line 15 bottles at a time. With four to six people working, they crank out 200 a minute, or more than 53,000 a work day. Clause hears lots of compliments from military people visiting Avery Island.