Legend has it that chocolate-chip cookies were invented in 1930 by an American innkeeper who ran out of baker's chocolate.
She improvised by breaking a semi-sweet chocolate bar into small pieces.
Instead of melting, the chocolate merely softened, dotting the cookie with chocolate chips.
They look homemade, and they taste homemade, but this home is a factory.
Each ingredient goes into an industrial-sized mixer, starting with white sugar,
then brown sugar,
then butter.
The mixer thoroughly blends these first ingredients until the butter becomes soft and creamy
and the sugars are evenly dispersed.
Then it's time for the headliner: chocolate chips.
They're semi-sweet, which is a mixture of bitter and sweet chocolate.
Next, flour,
followed by baking soda to make the dough rise,
and salt to add flavor.
The final ingredients are whole eggs, beaten,
combined with vanilla made from beans harvested in Madagascar, Africa.
Mixing resumes until everything is well blended,
which usually takes about five minutes.
The company closely guards recipe specifics,
but if you're curious, you could probably figure them out
by multiplying the ingredients of a home recipe to the yield of a production batch.
Workers transfer the cookie dough to a machine called the former.
It pushes the dough through round eyes,
producing row upon row of round pieces weighing 1.4 ounces each -
one of several sizes the factory produces.
The factory then flash-freezes the dough rounds for sale to foodservice customers such as restaurants and hotels,
which bake the cookies in their own kitchens.
The freeze tunnel uses liquid nitrogen to create the frigid temperature.
The passing dough rounds solidify in approximately 5 minutes.
Exiting the freeze tunnel, the dough rounds pass under a metal detector
to ensure they don't contain any metal particles.
This safety measure is standard practice in the food industry.
The packaging system is entirely automated.
The first station erects the box.
The second station lines it with plastic.
A conveyor belt, meanwhile, feeds the frozen unbaked cookies onto automated scales.
Once the scale hits the per-box weight, feeding pauses.
The bottom swings open and the cookies drop into the box waiting directly underneath.
The next stations seal and label the boxes, which workers then load onto pallets.
The pallets go into a storage freezer, where they stay until it's time to ship them out by freezer truck to the customer.
This company also sells gift tins of cookies online and by catalog.
For that market, they bake the cookies in-house.
Workers lay out the dough rounds two inches apart on trays lined with parchment paper.
This prevents sticking, making it easy to remove the baked cookies without breaking them.
The dough rounds are nearly one and a half inches wide by one inch high.
As they bake, they flatten out and double in diameter.
The trays remain in the oven for seven minutes at 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
A turntable inside rotates them so that the cookies bake evenly throughout the tray.
A few cookies per batch go to the quality control tester,
who unfortunately doesn't get to conduct the assessment by eating the samples.
Rather, the tester measures the diameter and height to ensure consistency in size and chip content.
In the online and catalog order assembly area,
workers line the bottom part of the gift tin with a decorative cellophane bag.
Then they carefully layer the correct number of fresh cookies inside in a staggered configuration.
This not only creates a nice presentation, it also prevents damage in transit.
They close the bag with a gold twist tie to seal in the freshness,
close up the tin, then pack it for shipping.
This is how to give a gift of homemade chocolate chip cookies without ever setting foot in the kitchen.