Jackson’s Chips S64 W15569 Commerce Center Parkway, Muskego INDUSTRY: Food manufacturing EMPLOYEES: Approximately 70 jacksonschips.com A Muskego manufacturer housed in an unassuming grey industrial building, tucked behind a Walmart store, is churning out thousands of pounds of sweet potato chips every day. Jackson’s Chips was started as a family business by Scott and Megan Reamer
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A worker grabs freshly packaged Jackson’s chips off the production line.[/caption]
“We don’t feel like the bath is necessary, but it happens anyway,” he said. “It’s just how the equipment was built.”
After moving through the bath, the sweet potatoes are moved through slicing equipment. That equipment can slice 200 pounds of potatoes in a matter of seconds.
From there, they are transported to the frying room. Jackson’s uses five large-scale kettle fryers to cook all of its sweet potato chips in avocado oil. The sliced potatoes generally cook between six and seven minutes.
“Kettles are small-batch fryers. The process is kind of like an inverted bell curve,” said Marino. “It starts at a certain temperature, what we call zone one. Then, the temperature dips down into zone two. Then it rises back up to its entrance temperature at the end of zone three.”
Once cooked, the chips head to a different room to be seasoned with one of Jackson’s many flavors, whether that be traditional sea salt or a more modern flavor like spicy jalapeño or farmhouse ranch. The chips are then sent off to be packaged.
Demand for Jackson’s sweet potato chips has exploded, and the company has had to add both space and equipment to keep up.
Last fall, Jackson’s added 10,000 square feet of space, two new kettles and two new packaging lines. The company also added 27,000 square feet of warehousing space to store its products, three times the size of its original warehouse space.
When the company is ready to grow again, Marino said there’s room for two more production lines within the current facility. A timeline for that expansion has yet to be announced.
While Jackson’s products do have a physical presence in big-box retailers like Costco and Festival Foods, the company is looking for alternative ways to get in front of consumers. That might include places like airports, pharmacies and local coffee shops.
“It’s not just about being in retail environments,” said Marino. “The cool thing about snacks and chips is if you look around, they’re sold everywhere.”