Tikkabik

So this morning the kids and we took a tour of the Cape Cod Potato Chip factory in Hyannis, Mass. They offer self-guided walking tours of the factory during normal business hours.

Having grown up with Lay's and Pringles, the first time I tasted Cape Cod chips was something of a revelation: They're kettle-cooked, which gives them a very dense and crisp texture -- it's an old-fashioned technique, and Cape Cod's success has given the big competitors at Frito-Lay and so on cause to come out with their own kettle cooked variety. Maybe it's just local chauvanism, but I like to stick with Cape Cod chips when I can find them.

The tour is done down one side of the factory, behind walls of reinforced glass so as not to disturb the factory itself. They have information panels at various points to offer you details about what you're seeing, though it's pretty self-explanatory.

Pretty neat stuff -- conveyer belts, big kettle cookers venting steam into the ceiling, huge tumblers salting the chips, and relatively few people inside -- mainly there for quality control, bagging, stirring the kettle fryers and a few other things.

They also make their own cheese popcorn, and I learned on the tour that it's a one-man operation. And interesting trivia point: It takes four pounds of potatoes to make a single pound of chips. And the chips that don't pass their quality control measures end up getting recycled as animal feed. Lucky livestock. They can bag upwards of 80,000 bags of chips per day.

The kids and I think it would be really fun to shrink ourselves down to the size of a chip and ride the conveyer belt that takes them from the fry kettle onward, to dry, to be salted and then to be bagged. That'd be fun until someone tried to eat us, we decided.

At the end of the tour they have a gift shop where they sell plenty of logoed stuff, as well as exotic flavors of chips we hadn't yet tried (I love their new Jalape