T. Marzetti Plant in Horse Cave has big appetite for soybean oil

Article provided by Kentucky Soybean Board, by Rae Wagoner

There is hidden treasure in the city of Horse Cave, Kentucky, but one doesn’t have to go caving in order to find it. A trip to your local grocery store or even a number of chain restaurants will put you in contact with what may be Hart County’s best kept secret – the T. Marzetti Company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lancaster Colony Corporation. 

You might ask, “why would a bunch of farmers care about a company that makes salad dressing?” The answer is soybean oil, and lots of it. After a tip from Governor’s Office of Ag Policy Executive Director Warren Beeler, it was decided that someone from the soybean board needed to visit this plant, because surely no one company could be using that much soybean oil. 

T. Marzetti does. Assistant Plant Manager Shannon Johnson shared some of the purchasing figures for the Horse Cave location. Some quick math shows that this facility alone consumes about eight percent of the total soybean oil output of the state of Kentucky. 

So, what are they doing with all of that soybean oil? They are using it and other ingredients (including another product made from our beans – soy sauce) to make tasty salad dressings, sauces and their famous coleslaw dressing. In addition to the offerings you see on your retail grocer’s shelves and in the refrigerated produce case, Assistant Plant Manager Shannon Johnson said that – while he can’t name names – if you enjoy a meal out at one of the nation’s top twenty-five restaurants, there’s a good chance that you’ll be enjoying some products from Marzetti’s foodservice line. 

The split between retail and foodservice production company-wide is about 50/50, Johnson said, while the Horse Cave plant’s production leans heavily to the foodservice side. “When the company was looking to expand, Horse Cave was chosen with foodservice in mind,” he said. “We are an hour from Nashville and an hour from Louisville, so we are pretty centrally located to many of our key customers’ distribution centers.”

Production at the Horse Cave plant boggles the mind, as does the sheer footprint of the warehouse space required to house not only the finished products (about 300), but also the massive amount of ingredients – more than 700 at last count. While soybean oil is kept in two large tanks that have a combined capacity of 133,000 pounds, the other ingredients require a variety of temperature-controlled environments. Some ingredients like spices need low humidity, while corn syrup and honey are stored warm. Fresh veggies – which are delivered daily – are kept cool while other ingredients are stored frozen. 

The finished product warehouse includes both ambient temperature storage and refrigerated storage. Johnson said the warehouse  holds about two weeks of product, which is constantly rotated for maximum freshness.  The total footprint of the plant encompasses 315,000 square feet, and the plant employs 525 workers plus some temps. The plant operates round the clock, seven days a week, to meet the demand for its products. 

On our visit, we noticed that not just the warehouses but the entire plant floor was scrupulously clean. As visitors, we were required to observe a number of good manufacturing practices (GMPs) including hearing protection, hairnets, smocks and shoe covers. Everyone who enters the production area is required to wash their hands thoroughly, and there is antibacterial powder on the mats in front of the sink. It’s easy to see that both food safety and worker safety are high priorities, as is quality control. From upper management to line workers, everyone seemed to be in tune with the CEO’s tagline – The Better Food Company. 

 In preparing for our visit, we spent some time on the company website, www.marzetti.com, and were pleased to see the large number of products that have soybean oil listed on the ingredients panel. Manufacturers are required to list ingredients in order of the amount  contained in the product, and several Marzetti brand items list soybean oil first.

During the plant tour, Johnson shared that of all the products made in the Horse Cave facility annually, nearly 30 percent of their weight is from soybean oil.

Marzetti’s corporate headquarters is in Westerville, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, where Teresa Marzetti operated a popular restaurant beginning in 1896. Customers liked Teresa’s homemade dressings so much that she started selling them by the bottle and eventually opened a dressing factory on the upper floor of the restaurant. In 1969, the Marzetti family decided to sell the business. John B. “Bernie” Gerlach, then CEO of Lancaster Colony, was interested. He eventually helped Lancaster Colony acquire the T. Marzetti Company. After Teresa Marzetti’s death in 1972, the restaurant was closed forever, but her passion for quality still lives in Marzetti’s many salad dressings and other specialty food products.