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In the bakery prep room at Elias Brothers' food-processing plant in Warren, an overhead crane lifts a 2,000-pound dough ball and drops it into a machine that kneads and divides it into thousands of sandwich buns.
Nearby, in the meat area, workers shovel ground pork into a machine that spits out yard-long sausage coils.
In the soup and sauce room, a huge vat holds a bubbling sea of thick, salmon-colored liquid --600 gallons of Thousand Island dressing.
Mountains of meat, tons of dough, oceans of milk, oil, soup and sauce -- it's all in a day's work for the 450 employees in the Elias Brothers 300,000-square-foot commissary off of Ryan Road in Warren.
Fred Elias, 76, and Louis Elias, 73, chairman and president, respectively, of Elias Brothers Restaurants Inc., like to call the processing plant their "kitchen".
Some kitchen.
It operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, turning out hundreds of prepared foods, including sauces, soups, ice cream, bakery items -- and the ground-beef patties used in Big Boy hamburgers.
It supplies all the food for 300 Big Boy restaurants in Michigan, Ohio, New York, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Canada, and nine Top Hat restaurants.
It also provides all the hamburger...