SIKESTON'S ICE CREAM PLANT KEEPS EVERYONE IN `GOOD HUMOR'

SIKESTON -- Six-year-old Kirsten Grothe says her dad's "the Good Humor man."

Dale Grothe chuckles at the thought. It's a nice feeling, he admits.

The bearded Grothe said people smile when they hear what he does for a living. Grothe is personnel manager for the Good Humor-Breyers Ice Cream plant in Sikeston.

Grothe has worked at the plant for a little over a year, having previously been employed at a chicken processing company.

"I used to do chickens. Now, I do ice cream," he said.

Ice cream's better. "Everybody loves you. My 6-year-old daughter more than anyone is impressed."

Grothe said his daughter wants him to visit her first-grade class and bring along some ice cream treats.

From the outside, the ice cream plant looks like just another factory, sprawled across the flat lands of Sikeston.

But once inside, the visitor is greeted with a display case showing off the colorful packing for the company's Popsicles, Fudgsicles and ice cream bars.

The plant produced over 400 million ice cream bars and other frozen treats last year, amounting to 6.6 million gallons of the tasty stuff.

One of the products is Viennetta, an ice cream dessert that comes in several flavors: vanilla, chocolate, mint; as well as strawberry frozen yogurt. It consists of folds of flavored ice cream alternating with crisp chocolate.

"This is the only plant in the country that is making this product," said Grothe. "It is very popular in Europe. It's now being marketed in the United States under the Breyers brand."

Most of the plant's products are on Popsicle sticks. The Sikeston facility used more than 385 million Popsicle sticks last year.

The plant, which has two shifts, employs about 275 people year round. But in the summer months the labor force balloons to more than 300, with the plant operating seven days a week.

"I would expect this year to be probably close to 350 employees," said Grothe.

The plant has expanded several times since the first ice cream bar rolled off the production line on May 15, 1980. It has grown from a single production line to 12 lines.

Gold Bond Ice Cream company was the original owner. The company was founded in Wisconsin by Thomas Lutsey, who took over his family's hometown dairy in 1942. He built the company into a nationwide producer of frozen treats.

The company came to Sikeston as a result of incentives provided by a development-minded city council.

In April 1979, Sikeston voters passed a bond issue to help fund construction of the Gold Bond plant. The original plant covered 34,000 square feet and had 25 employees.

In August 1980, another bond issue was passed, and the plant expanded to 70,000 square feet. Other expansions followed.

In 1989, Unilever, a multi-national corporation, purchased Gold Bond and shifted the focus of the company's four plants to production of the Good Humor brand products.

By 1990, 10 years after the Sikeston plant opened, the facility covered 90,000 square feet and employed 175 people.

On Oct. 25, 1993, the company purchased Breyers Ice Cream. The Sikeston plant not only manufactures ice cream bars and other frozen treats, but serves as a distribution center for Breyers products.

For the ice cream products, the raw materials are cream and milk, and the other ingredients that flavor and sweeten it, Grothe said.

"We get big stainless, steel tankers every day pulling in here. It comes in, is blended and pasteurized. It's routed through stainless steel pipes to the production areas and an operator takes whatever final blending steps are necessary."

The tasty treats are molded, extruded and even dipped. Then, they're wrapped and packed.

Frozen treats manufactured at the Sikeston plant are shipped across the nation.

Dressed in a white lab coat, Grothe fills in as tour guide for visitors to the plant. Hair and beard nets, and galoshes or boots are standard equipment in the plant's three production rooms.

In one of the plant's production rooms, frozen juice bars are created in orange, strawberry and apple favors.

The liquid goes into molds, which are bathed on the outside by a super chilled brine. The temperature in the brine is about 33 degrees below zero. "It is all a very carefully controlled process of exacting temperatures," said Grothe.

On another line, Klondike Krunch bars are being made at the rate of 140 a minute. The ice cream goes through a freezer and comes out as bars. Popsicle sticks are inserted in them and the bars are covered with a chocolate and crispy rice coating.

Once packaged, all of the products go through a metal detector. If a piece of metal is found, the device automatically shuts down the line.

Another device weighs the packaged items. If they weigh too little or too much, they're automatically blown off the assembly line with a blast of air.

With the layered Viennetta ice cream dessert, the product is made by discharging the ice cream through a series of nozzles.

"Every nozzle gives it a new layer and finally it is sliced into the bars," said Grothe.

The various packaged treats are put in cardboard boxes and sent on an overhead conveyor belt to the storage freezer.

It's 20 below zero in the cavernous freezer, where forklift drivers wear winter coats, gloves and even ski masks.

"This is a nice January day in North Dakota where I am from," remarked Grothe.

From 14 to 20 truckloads of ice cream bars and other frozen treats are shipped from the plant each day.

Each truck can carry about 25 pallets, each pallet stacked high with 1,200 dozen ice cream bars, Popsicles and other treats.

"It's a whole heck of a lot of ice cream," said Jimmy Duncan, freezer supervisor.

Frozen treats, including the Marvel Comics X-Men ice cream bars, are available in a cooler in the break room.

"Every day we do a taste test," said a smiling Grothe. A group of management and hourly employees sample the products.

"There are people here who don't eat ice cream anymore," said Grothe, who makes it clear he's not one of them. In fact, Grothe participates in the taste test whenever he can.

To Grothe, there's nothing better than an ice cream break.

That certainly wouldn't surprise his daughter or her classmates. After all, what else would you expect from the "Good Humor man?"