The Keebler elves' magic secret.

• Author: Keaton, Joanne
• Position: Thomas L. Green and Company Inc.'s food processing equipment

For 100 years, Thomas L. Green & Co. has built the machinery that makes cookies, crackers and chips.

Cookies, crackers, chips, brownies and toaster pastries can disappear quickly. But the machines that make them seem to last forever.

Thomas L. Green & Co. Inc., located near downtown Indianapolis, has been making and installing snack-food automatic-production-line equipment since 1893. "Building the highest quality equipment you can" is the business' mission, says Todd Lugar, the company's director of business development and the fourth generation Lugar in the business. A testimonial of that quality can be found in Mexico, where a 1912 basic spindle mixer is still in daily use.

A list of some Green equipment--such as dough mixers, dough rolling and cutting machines, ovens, cooling conveyors and packing tables--gives a simplified view of snack-food production processes. Another piece, the dough laminator, reveals a basic difference between cracker and cookie making: A dough laminator folds cracker dough over--three, six or even eight times--because layering provides texture (cookies are not laminated).

Such equipment can produce thousands of pounds of food products per hour. Can you imagine ovens longer than 300 feet? Green & Co. makes them.

An inside joke at Green & Co. says the company has never built the same machine twice. That may be close to true--the firm works closely with customers in designing equipment to fill both production and space requirements. An extreme example of individual design happened in Hong Kong, where ground space is difficult to come by. There, Green installed a five-story operation; baking...