Offered in mild and hot flavors, the tasty and nutritious Crunchy Pea Sticks treats are packaged by the foursome—normally in the evening after completing their respective day-job shifts elsewhere—into 70-, 150- and 454-gram bags that ultimately find their way into some 40 East Indian and West Indian food stores in Ontario, and another 40 shops in New York State that cater primarily to their local West Indian, and Guyanese, South Asian communities.
Photo by Sandra Strangemore
Vegging Out
“To manufacture the Crunchy Pea Sticks, we take wholesome, all-natural, Canadian-grown yellow peas that are rich in vegetarian protein and pound it into a powder, add water and spices, and push the dough through an extruder to form it into an elongated stick-shape—before frying it in oil,” Seegobin explains.
“It’s a very labor-intensive process, but at least with our new WeighPack equipment, it removes some of the burden in production—allowing us to grow our business.
“While the company did do well manufacturing everything by hand, the success we achieved was not exactly overwhelming,” says Seegobin, who in 2007 embarked on an ambitious $1.5-million equipment and facility upgrade to propel the company on to that elusive ‘next level’ of growth.
With a modern new facility—including a fairly large warehouse—in place, Seegobin turned his attention to the production and packaging side of things in April of this year by approaching one of Canada’s bagging equipment specialists and manufacturers, WeighPack Systems, Inc.
Renowned in packaging industry circles for manufacturing a diverse range of hard-working, highly reliable horizontal and vertical baggers, as well as conveyors, the Montreal-headquartered machine-builder quickly responded to Seegobin’s needs with a prompt delivery and installation of an Xpdius Elite 800 bagger and incline infeed conveyor manufactured by WeighPack itself, integrated with a high-performance, 14-head Primo Weigher model weighing/scaling system manufactured by CombiScale Inc.
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