Oohs and aahs as Tastykake plant opens at Navy Yard

Beyond the mothballed warships and shuttered workshops at the edge of the Philadelphia Navy Yard, the narrative Tuesday, for a welcome change, was of rebuilding.

Make that rebaking.

In a city that is accustomed to losing its best-known and best-loved industrial food giants - Whitman Chocolates, for one, and later Breyers Ice Cream - Tasty Baking Co. (est. 1914) was celebrating its grand opening on the former site of the Navy's brig.

Actually, it was a grand reopening - complete with the cute-as-buttons, maroon-jacketed Girard College choir singing the Tasty jingle, "Nobody bakes a cake . . ."

The state-of-the-art plant - hailed as the "largest green bakery in the world" - is a new edition of the six-story Tasty factory that had been a landmark in North Philadelphia's Nicetown section for 88 years.

With highly automated ovens from Australia and Lititz, Pa., and its "straight-line flow" from production to packaging to warehouse, it requires 215 fewer workers (all of them eliminated through attrition).

Still, the silver lining, as more than one speaker noted, was that by relocating in the Navy Yard at the southernmost tip of South Broad Street, Tasty had kept 350 prized manufacturing jobs from leaving the city.

"It's a dream come true for me," said Tasty Baking's beaming president and chief executive, Charles Pizzi. "This is as good as it gets . . . as good as a championship down Broad Street."

Inside the sprawling, 345,000-square-foot plant, massive, silvery "auto-bake, serpentine ovens" were baking trays of Butterscoth Krimpets (922 pieces a minute), chocolate cupcakes, and Tasty's signature pocket-size pies.

WHYY chief executive officer Bill Marrazzo, watching from an overhead mezzanine, leaned over to Pizzi, suggesting that "it's all about the city water." (Marrazzo is the former water commissioner.)

But that brought up another point. Pizzi said that the water flowing into the plant here was an average of 30 degrees cooler than the water in Hunting Park, requiring warming before formulating products.

Whether it was the water temperature, the newfangled ovens, the recipe, or rosy memories, a first taste of the new line's Krimpets - upon reflection - lacked a bit of the moist, rich, buttery character that has been their trademark.

Several Inquirer staffers who tried the Krimpets found them wanting, as well. Some said the icing wasn't as "butterscotch-y," that it was "too sugary," or thinner. One bemoaned "less flavor." Another found them not as "spongy." Another - ouch! - said "the cake wasn't as tasty."

"They're not the sinful indulgence of yore," opined Craig LaBan, The Inquirer's restaurant critic.

A two-cake packet has shed its trans fat but weighs in at 20 calories more than in 2008, has slightly more cholesterol and more sodium - numbers that have not endeared them to healthy-snacking advocates.

Outside the buff-colored plant, it was a feel-good scene where about 250 politicos and officials jockeyed to demonstrate hometown cred. U.S. Rep. Bob Brady (D., Phila.) said he grew up with Pizzi, both of them carrying Tastykakes in their school lunch bags.

Pizzi confirmed that later but said he didn't actually get to eat the Tastykakes until he'd finished delivering the Bulletin in the Overbrook neighborhood where he grew up.

Peter Longstreth, president of the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp., said he was a pie guy. By prerecorded video, Gov. Rendell acknowledged he was such a major Tastykake consumer that "when Charlie [Pizzi] brought this project to me, I almost had to disqualify myself."

The $78 million factory was underwritten by $31 million in publicly subsidized financing, much of it from the state of Pennsylvania.

Tasty Baking's "greenest bakery" claim is based on several factors, including energy-efficient heating and cooling, water conservation, the use of recycled building materials, "daylight harvesting," and other environmental efficiencies.