MORTON, Ill. — Every year between August and November, Steve Beuttel eats a lot of pumpkin pie.
“I try to make it every day, and I’m usually pretty good at it” — it being what he calls quality control.
Beuttel is the operations manager for the Libby’s pumpkin cannery that’s at the epicenter of the canned-pumpkin world: the small Illinois town of Morton.
For about 13 weeks, a seemingly endless line of big rigs delivers pumpkins — millions of them — that’ll become countless pies and loaves of sweet, fresh-baked pumpkin bread. Somewhere between 80 percent and 85 percent of all the canned pumpkin consumed in the U.S. comes from this cannery, owned by parent company Nestle USA.
That gives Morton a pretty good claim to the title it embraces, Pumpkin Capital of the World. And in a good year with a cool Midwestern summer like this one, Libby’s has the cannery running day and night.
Pumpkins aren’t quite everything in Morton, but they mean a lot to the former farming town — providing an annual festival, about 150 seasonal cannery jobs and another 50 or so year-round jobs in this town of 16,000. Pumpkins give Morton an identity beyond being a bedroom community for nearby Peoria, said John Ackerman. He grows 30 acres of pumpkins for Nestle and another 30 acres to sell from his farm.
“We’re the people that have pumpkin pancakes at our Pumpkin Festival,” he said. “It’s fun. We understand just how much Midwest Americana that is. We enjoy it.”
