Tabasco Pepper Sauce Plant, Avery Island, Louisiana

 

We were really interested in going to the Tabasco Pepper Sauce Plant on Avery Island, just outside of New Iberia where we also visited the Shadows-on-the-Teche antebellum home, the Konriko Rice Mill, and enjoyed a great lunch at Victor’s Cafeteria.

Tours are free, but it does cost $1 to drive onto Avery Island. Tours begin with a short (3-5 minute) informative talk by a staff member (who handed out small bottles of different kinds of Tabasco sauce) and then we watched a movie.  Out of the three movies/slide shows we saw that day, thus was the most disappointing – it started off well, but then became just propaganda to purchase items at their store. Once the movie was over, we took a self-guided walk (about 50’) to watch the plant in action – there were a couple signs along the way, but really we simply watched people work (which consisted of sitting on a stool watching the automated assembly line). 

 

 

We then walked the short distance to the company store (there were signs along the way that were interesting, such as the fact that there is a working salt mine on Avery Island) where we could try different sauces, Tabasco ice cream (not good) and Tabasco coke-a-cola (tasted no different). Overall, we were most disappointed with this part of our educational day ~ the staff was not friendly (and we had discussed at length during lunch at Victor’s how friendly the people of Louisiana have been everywhere) , the “tour” not very good, the movie basically an advertisement of their products, and simply lacking – for example, how about a pepper plant or two outside to showcase your product? Interestingly, only about 10% of the Tabasco sauce is made on Avery Island ~ 90% is made in South America.

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