We’re still doing the rest of the building, and at the end of this, we still have to paint the iron and that kind of stuff, but that will go during operations. “Obviously, with a construction project this big, you’ve got to get running, testing and continue to build, modify, all that kind of stuff. “In terms of the operation, we’ve been running for months,” Schilling said. But the recent upgrades allow it to retain all those employees for the off times, and have a higher number of high-skilled workers on staff to tend to the machinery. Until last month, Schilling used a lot of temporary help for its labor-intensive days, primarily because it would do a whole week of production and then nothing for three weeks. We have one of the newer, high-tech machines to do that kind of operation,” Schilling said. We also have some cool, secondary packaging to create those six to 12-pack boxes that everybody likes these days, as opposed to the old rings. For instance, we have a big pasteurization tunnel, which is a nice way to create shelf stability without chemicals. “We also have some pretty trick technology that’s specific to our product. “Our can lines can run up to 1,200 cans a minute, which is faster than all the breweries in Seattle combined. “Most other businesses in the greater Puget Sound Area that are of regional scale, their canning lines would be between 80 cans a minute and 300 cans a minute,” said Schilling. But the company’s multi-million-dollar investment into its own canning and seaming equipment has brought that part of the operation in from the cold and removed the plant’s most significant bottleneck.Īnd, top to bottom, it has already transformed the company. Until late last year, however, the Auburn Plant tanked its finished ciders to a local cannery, which filled and seamed the cans before returning them to Schilling for placement into boxes and case trays for distribution. Ever since the plant opened in 2015, processing of the raw apples into juice has been completed in Yakima in Eastern Washington, and the juices trucked to Auburn and piped directly into enormous tanks, where time and expertise turn the many juice blends into hard ciders.