Our buddy Daryl Mustard invited us to take a tour of his place of employment, which he described as “the largest bottling plant in the Southern Hemisphere.”
We had no idea how large it would prove to be. Holy crap. The numbers are absolutely mind boggling.
Daryl’s at the top of the org chart at a plant that bottles 400,000 dozen bottles of wine per week. In other words, 4,800,000 individual bottles go out the door every seven days.
The plant is immense, more than a million square feet, filled with robots, but empty of people. Well, not exactly empty, but the operation is so automated that they are able to do all that bottling, packaging, and shipping with only about six workers on each of the three daily eight hour shifts.
They had rules against taking photos inside the plant, but trust me — the Mustard clan is a lot better looking than the robots.
We’ve finally found someone who is worse than I am at taking selfies. Here’s half of Lisa, Daryl, a portion of daughter Ebony, my young pal Lochie, Jamie and me. Older sister Jamiee had the unmitigated gall to think showing up for her job was more important than this tour.
Come on Jim, is that really a picture of you? You shaved, no hat, it doesn’t look like you. hahaha
Anyway, I didn’t know they grew that many grapes in the “down under”! 400,000 bottles per week is a lot of vino!
400,000 DOZEN.
Glad you enjoyed your tour guys, even after Jim scaring us a couple of times by almost shutting half the plant down by leaning on E-stops!!!
Missing you already
Love the Mustard’s xxxxx
To fill in the details of Lisa’s story: Remember the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy keeps yanking on the overhead cable to make the train screech to a halt? There’s a similar set-up at Daryl’s plant. A thin, red cable runs along each side of the walkway in front of various conveyor belts. Daryl warned us not to touch the cable because it’s a safety device that can shut down the entire plant. I unconsciously leaned against it about 30 seconds later. Daryl barked at me like he’d bark at his misbehaving kids. I apologized and then, moron that I am, did it again within about five minutes. He was not happy with me.
Ohhhhh and it was a good selfie……..was meant to only have a slice of my dial in it ????????
Hahaha ???????? you obviously felt like a naughty school kid. lucky Daryl doesn’t have a cane ????????????