Tasty Tour

Who wants the same old school field trip or tourist experience when you can watch flour and sugar shoot through compression tubes en route to being made into Butterscotch Krimpets? I got a chance to tour the new TastyKake factory at the Navy Yard earlier this week. The first pie rolls off the line on October 11 of this year, 75 years to the day that TastyKake's first pie ever was made.

The site has a ways to go in terms of setting up and testing everything - heck, they had only gotten utility hook-up 24 hours before our tour, which was arranged through Urban Land Institute - but you could already visualize the factory in motion, and schoolkids and visitors meandering through the well-designed catwalks and hallways, which seem to hover above all the machinery.

Of course, I'll be back with my kids when it's open to the public. Hey, I was told that part of the tour will involve taste-testing. And, after lugging home two boxes from my visit this week, my kids are hooked and want to see where the source is.