Gallery: See How a Single Factory Can Make 210,000 Apple Pies a Day
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 John Loomis When Thanksgiving afternoon rolls around and you need extra pies fast (hello, uninvited in-laws), your grocery store is probably your best bet. Food giant ConAgra produces the Marie Callender's brand you'll find in the freezer case, and it makes a lot of them—some 210,000 single-serve (perfect for sending a passive-aggressive message to gate-crashers) apple pies a day at its Council Bluffs, Iowa, facility. How? Huge cubes of shortening, for starters.
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 John Loomis 1 | make the apple Filling Stephanie Bolli, the company's master apple taster, uses Jonathan apples for a balance between sweet and tart flavors. The fruit joins sugar and a cinnamon mix in a saucepan that holds 2,000 pounds of filling.
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 John Loomis 2 | mix the dough Fifty-pound blocks of vegetable shortening head into industrial mixers, where blades slice it into the flour like a food processor would. The tiny particles of fat permeating the raw pastry make it flaky when baked.
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 John Loomis 3 | Prepare the crusts Squares of dough are dropped into tins and pressed to form the bottom crusts. The "lids" are sheeted—rolled into progressively thinner layers—to further enhance their flakiness.
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 John Loomis 4 | Fill the shells The crusts (minus their lids) pass underneath a depositing machine. The equipment has to be gentle to avoid bruising the apple slices as they travel down a tube and glop into the pie bottoms.
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 John Loomis 5 | Crimp the lids A crimp head creates a decorative pattern (just like Grandma would have made with her fork if she were a robot) and cuts away the excess dough. The top sheets seal the pies so that juices don't boil out during baking.
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 John Loomis 6 | Freeze and ship the pies The desserts enter a blast freezer for rapid cooling. "The fruit releases more water as it cooks if it's been frozen slowly," Bolli says. Then it's off to stores—and awkward family gatherings—across the country.
