First Company Visits

Today, we had our first company visits, which were much more involved and informative than I thought they would be. We first visited Bosques De Mauco, which is my company that I will be presenting on in the fall. The tour was very involved and informative, but the smells of the plant were less than desirable. When walking around outside by all of the composting, since the compost was made of hay and animal manure, it had a very bad stench. However, once inside the rest of the plant, the conditions got better. Our guide was very thorough in showing us the mushroom growth at various stages and the assembly lines that the mushrooms go through for both canned and fresh mushroom products.
We also visited Centauro which had an informative talk before hand and a good tour except for the fact that they were out of season and none of the equipment was running. However, the president was very nice and tried to compensate by answering all of the questions we had. I realized that the questions we were told to ask proved be very useful in gaining more knowledge and understanding of the company as they brought up topics that the tour would not have otherwise covered. Also, I was surprised that both tour guides spoke very good english and, as top executives in their companies, they had the time and the will to give us these tours themselves. After the company visits, we had empanadas again at a different restaurant and they were very good, especially the mushroom ones. Overall, I really enjoyed the company visits because it was really interesting to see the entire production process of a product and see the process from the start to the finished product.