#HTE

A Weird and Wonderful Tour of the Japanese KitKat Factory

Watching things being made in a factory is fun. Fanatical Japanese attention to detail is fun to watch too. In this series of short videos, we get to see both.

Nestlé Japan has a factory in Ibaraki Prefecture, and this is where the KitKats are made. Here in Part 1 of their factory tour, we get to see their insane safety and cleaning rituals. It starts with mandatory finger-pointing in the parking lot:

Safety & Hygiene Management and the Chocolate Tank Room

The Baking Line

In Part 2 we get to see the freshly-baked wafers, which run through a cooling process that will look familiar to residents of St. Louis. Next they’re coated with “sandwich cream,” then stacked and processed by robots. I guess they can’t show the part that cuts the larger wafers into the smaller blanks* since there appears to be a blade guard over it, but I’d have liked to see that.

(*To anyone with experience in factories like these, I apologize if “blanks” is not the correct terminology; my school didn’t have a Candy Bar Production Methods class where I’d have learned the appropriate nomenclature.)

The Molding Line

Part 3 is where the wafers are added, by robots, to the chocolate-filled molds. I’m a little bummed that they don’t show the actual part ejection step:

The Packaging Line

Part 4 is where everything gets wrapped up, literally. Pretty cool to see the automatic box-folding and loading:

In that final longshot of the factory, I’m surprised there are as many cars and parking spaces as there are; you don’t see any humans during the highly automated production process. I suspect that K. Kohno and H. Matsumoto are either taste testers or robot service technicians.

https://www.core77.com/posts/80990/A-Weird-and-Wonderful-Tour-of-the-Japanese-KitKat-Factory