SOYJOY: The Whole Story

Step into the retail time machine and go back 20, maybe 30 years to your supermarket of days gone by. There was no Sprouts. No familiar organic brands like Horizon or Newman's Own. There probably weren't many all natural products at all, save for some dusty carob-flavored something-or-others in the over-stuffed "health food store" on the edge of town. And soy? Well it's a pretty good bet that the only soy product your local supermarket carried had the name "Kikkoman" on the front of the bottle.

But while the U.S. languished in what we might call the Fruit Loops Era, cranking out brilliantly marketed but nutritionally vacuous food products, in Japan and other parts of the world, a health revolution was already well underway. And the soy plant – rooted in the ancient cultures of the East, but flowering into a tremendous diversity of modern foods and other consumer products – was at its vanguard.

One of the products of that revolution was a simple whole soy nutrition bar developed by the innovative Japanese company Otsuka Pharmaceutical. (Otsuka operates many companies worldwide, manufacturing products for medical care and wellness which have the broad philosophical mandate of cultivating "...an ethic and vitality appropriate to an enterprise involved with human life"). With a unique slim wedge shape and a lineup of fruity flavors, it was given a name that had universal appeal: SOYJOY. And in the years since then, it has grown into a worldwide phenomenon that is sold in many parts of the globe and is featured in some wildly creative TV commercials, featuring crazy singing puppets, princesses, what we think are animated soy beans, a pitched battle between jelly beans and soy beans, and an intense office worker.

Soy, as it turns out, is truly one of nature's most complete products. Soybeans contain fiber, protein, healthful polyunsaturated fatty acids, antioxidants, vitamins, minerals and all 9 amino acids essential to human nutrition. They are low in saturated fat and are cholesterol-free. (Importantly, some of these nutritional benefits are available only in the whole soybean, which is what SOYJOY uses. When soybeans get processed for other uses, such as soymilk or tofu or soy protein isolate, some of the biological value dissipates.)

Soy is also used to make vegetable oil, flour, infant formula and tempeh, plus non-food products like biodiesel fuel, ink, resins, plastics, clothing and even crayons. Henry Ford was a big promoter of soybeans: he created a prototype car made out of soy plastics and even wore a silk-like suit spun from soy fibers. No wonder, then, that soy is the second most valuable export crop in the U.S. behind corn.

The SOYJOY Experience

Walking into SOYJOY's North American operations facility in Valencia, CA, it is easy to get a sense for the company's deep philosophical belief in soy. The 60,000-square-foot plant – one of the most pristine and efficient we have ever seen – is specifically designed to accommodate tours, with colorful information placards touting the benefits of soy ("If 25 percent of households in the U.S. and Canada swapped out one serving of beef for one serving of soy each week, the water savings over a year would be enough to provide 10 gallons of drinking water to every single person in the world"). When we toured the Valencia facility, we captured the highlights in a video you can view here. There's even a dedicated education facility called "The SOYJOY Experience" – a museum-like activity center that is, by turns, colorful, engaging and fun. It features see-through displays of soy bean plants, videos, historical murals, a crafts area and more. A licensed teacher wrote the soy-based curriculum that is used in The SOYJOY Experience, and three of the plant employees have been trained to lead the tours.

"What we have here is something unique," says Director of Plant Operations Leroy Lovier. "This was developed for educational purposes specifically around school-age children 3rd to 6th grade. It's an opportunity to bring people in, show them the benefits of soy... and allow them to see what we do here and kind of have a little fun while they are doing it."

But it's hard to tell who is having the most fun. Lovier has an easygoing manner about him, punctuated by a warm, infectious laugh and a broad smile that is visible even underneath the face mask that he wears on the plant floor. (All employees on the plant floor wear sanitary jump suits, hair nets, goggles, face masks, and even shoe coverings – far more protection than is required, but an understandable by-product of a company that, elsewhere in the world, is engaged in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals). He trades jokes with nearly everyone on the plant floor – one woman in the packaging room teases him about not wearing a tie for his big day in front of the video cameras – and is fully consumed by all the details of this picture-perfect production facility. And why not? He helped design the plant five years ago by incorporating all the best features and techniques he had learned during his 30 years in food production.

SOYJOY currently produces 10 different flavor bars out of the Valencia facility, having recently added pineapple to the mix.

"My personal favorite is banana," says Lovier. "My upbringing – the smell of banana bread in the morning. I just love the smell of that fresh banana." Though on this day, when strawberry is on the production line, the entire neighborhood smells pretty good.

The whole process begins in the Weighing Room, where all the raw ingredients arrive in bulk and are broken down into individual units. There are huge chunks of butter, sacks of dried strawberries and coconut, blocks of raisins, and other good stuff. SOYJOY Bars are 100 percent natural, so there is nothing unusual coming into the Weighing Room. Unless you consider the Chinese Matrimony Vine.

"It is indigenous to a very rural area of China," notes Lovier. "Chinese Matrimony Vine is also referred to as wolfberry or as goji berry. There's a mystical sense about gojiberries in Asian culture, so that is the rarest ingredient we have."

Each SOYJOY Bar recipe calls for a unique set of ingredients, and these get measured, weighed, recorded, and set onto a stainless steel cart in the exact order in which they will need to be mixed together. Then they are placed in a 55° room to "chill out" for a day.

Once the mixing process begins, it's a two-hour process from dough to done.

The ingredients get added to a huge mixing machine, essentially a Brobdingnagian KitchenAid, in a precise sequence; the dough is then broken down in a hopper, and forced through an extruder head at pressures of 100 PSI, resulting in long, thin, squared-up strings of dough that get cut into individual bars. Lovier likens the process to a Play-Doh Fun Factory. "You know, you...squeezed the handle and you formed it. We're doing the exact same thing here. Only difference is that we're doing it mechanically."

At the center of the Valencia production facility, both literally and figuratively, is the 90-foot direct-fire single-pass oven that is used to bake the bars. The oven contains a series of burners, controlled by a computer, that light up the bars inside like gold bricks and bake each one just so for 20 minutes.

The oven itself is actually more than 30 years old. It was brought over from Japan in crates when the Valencia facility opened in late 2006, and then rewired and reconfigured to the needs of SOYJOY.

"This used to be a manually operated oven," notes Lovier. "Which meant that when it was in Japan they had two individuals that would run up and down, and I do mean run, with little wrenches, and adjust the burners to keep the temperatures consistent during the day.... But they took meticulous care of it."

Ironically, the secret to recapturing the warmth, moistness and heavenly aroma once you get the bars home is also an oven. "Nuke'em," advises Brand Manager Rebecca Zimmerman. "Take the wrapper off, throw the bar in the microwave for 10 or 12 seconds, and it's fantastic."

Back in Valencia, moving belts transport the baked bars up a ramp and into the Cooling Room, where a large multi-deck spiral conveyor allows everything to cool down naturally in a temperature-controlled environment. SOYJOY doesn't use chillers – they just let the bars cool down over the course of 25 minutes, the same way you would at home. By using the spiral conveyor, allowing the bars to slowly wend their way along the belts, SOYJOY is able to cool lots of bars in a small amount of space for a long amount of time. And this system has a collateral benefit: like any room with a lot of fresh-baked product in it, this place smells wonderful and enticing.

From there, it's onto the Wrapping Room, where two high-speed lines operate side-by-side, encasing each bar in a special foil wrapper and then sealing it with a little heat, at a rate of 120 bars a minute. Even here, though, the precision of the SOYJOY operation is very much in evidence. One machine weighs the rapidly moving wrapped bars, and if it detects any irregularity at all, a puff of air will blow the wayward bar off the conveyor belt and into a bin, where it will later be inspected. Another machine takes x-rays of each bar, looking for any evidence of seeds or stems. There is almost never any. Lovier says with pride: "We've had 100 percent first-time quality in this facility. And our yields are consistently 99 to 100 percent all the time."

In the final step of the production line, the wrapped bars are placed into boxes by a team of SOYJOY employees – about the only step in the entire operation that is labor-intensive. The company could use robotic machines for this step, but the packers play an important role that no machine ever could.

"It's really amazing what they can see," says Lovier with a bit of awe. "They make it look easy, but they can spot a bar with no code on it. They can spot something that is open. They can spot something that is not right and they immediately get that information back."

SOYJOY has other manufacturing facilities around the world, to help serve the needs of China, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore and European countries. And given the company's heritage and Otsuka's commitment to bringing wellness products to the world, it is likely that all of them share a common passion for the wholesome, healthful soy products they create. But one thing is certain: none of them can match Valencia, CA, for sheer pride.

"There are two things here I'm incredibly proud of," says Lovier, now back in his regular clothes, showing off The SOYJOY Experience room and smiling broadly. "One is the workmanship of the people. That goes from safety to quality, all aspects of that. The other thing is the cleanliness of this facility. I started out trying to create the cleanest facility that I had ever worked in. And through the people and the things that we've done here, we have accomplished that."

In the end, though, he can't resist giving one more proud plug for the products he and his team are creating.

"Soy is a completely different entity in the United States. A lot of people don't know a lot about soy. We really feel that in order to be successful from a business standpoint, we need to let people understand what we offer from a health (perspective). We're an all natural product, we don't use artificial preservatives. And really what we have is something that is good and good for you. We want to get that message out any way we can."

from the March, 2011 edition of Fresh Off the Press