Help your child explore careers this summer without them even realizing it! If you have a vacation planned, company tours are easy, fun, and often inexpensive additions to an itinerary that can provide great exposure to interesting career options. In my blog post last week, I outlined three easy ways to integrate career planning exploration into your child’s summer. We don’t have children yet, but my husband and I still try to take industry tours regularly! We both enjoy learning about products we consume and the people and the roles that make it all happen.
We spent the holiday weekend last weekend in Wales. If you haven’t been, add it to your bucket list! The small region/country is riddled with medieval castles, history, and delicious sea food. When I mentioned to a friend that we were going to Wales, she immediately mentioned a fabulous sea salt company called Halen Mon that we needed to visit. She added that they give tours and sea salt tastings – sold on both accounts! Is anyone else curious about how sea salt is made? Let me give you the overview. 🙂
A little about the Halen Mon Company
This small, but mighty, operation employees 30 people and resides in a small warehouse-style building. BUT, they produce massive amounts of sea salt per year! These 30 dedicated employees are responsible for all parts production, marketing, sales, and distribution—impressive! And, as a fun side note, Prince William and Kate also visited Halen Mon this month!
Location is key!
Halen Mon is uniquely positioned on the south shore of Angelesy Island right on the Menai Strait. This location allows them to pump clean sea water (the area is free from industrial ships and barges and gets fresh water from the Atlantic due to is location relative to the jet stream) directly into a holding tank (pictured below) next to the warehouse. Here, the water is stored for a few hours or a few days, depending on production needs, until it is pumped into the warehouse for the harvesting of the natural sea salt.
Seawater is pumped directly from the Menai Strait to this tank for sea salt production.
As the water is pumped into the warehouse, it goes through an intense filtration system. While the water from the Menai Strait is fairly clean by seawater standards, they still have to bring it up to the United Kingdom’s Health and Safety Standards. As pictured below, the water is first filtered through sand, then charcoal, and finally through a specially designed filter that catches all of the contamination missed in the first two phases. The water is now ready for sea salt extraction.
The seawater is filtered through sand (middle), then charcoal (left), and finally through a specialized filter (right) to make sure it pure and ready for salt extraction.
How sea salt is extracted
Halen Mon used the brilliance of a chemical engineer to design specialized water tables that heat the sea water to about 80 degrees Celsius. Water evaporates into steam at that point but does not boil. This temperature is key for Halen Mon’s process and saves loads of energy making the process very eco-friendly!
These specially designed water crystallization tables help Halen Mon extract the sea salt from the seawater
After most of the sea water has evaporated, the salt is scooped out of the water crystallization tables by hand! Employees enter the warm room in full health and safety gear and manually shovel the sea salt with stainless steel shovels. This helps keep the salt crystals in good condition.
Ensuring a High Quality Product
After the sea salt is scooped out of the water tables, it is run through one last process to make sure it is clean and pure. Bits of chalk manage to survive the process to this point, so the salt is rinsed with salt-saturated water (to prevent the salt from dissolving) and then dried. And that is how sea salt is made!
Tasting the Finished Product
After the tour, we got to taste sea salt from Halen Mon as well as other varieties of salt. Halen Mon sells their pure sea salt in business-to-business markets for the making of crisps (or potato chips), sea salt caramels, and more! They also use a smoke house to smoke and flavor some of their salts! After our salt tasting, we opted for a chili and garlic sea salt rub and a sea salt caramel sauce. We have used both already! The chili and garlic sea salt rub made delicious salmon tacos and the sea salt caramel sauce went perfectly with vanilla ice cream. Learning can be delicious!
What we learned about careers
Sea salt is a highly technical process! It takes engineers, biologist, business professions and even hospitality professionals to make this operation happen. What if you chose to tour a company your child is already interested in? For example, the Jelly Belly factory provides tours. Or, how about touring Harley Davidson? Exposing students to all of the different roles that make this company successful can be very eye opening! It can encourage this to really think about how they can combine their passions and work for an organization that they really like and already value.
Build career planning into your child’s summer!
Last week on the blog I outlined three easy ways to build career planning and exploration into your child’s summer. If you missed it, be sure to check it out! I provided links to several great websites that list great company tours by location and industry!
How can I help?
If you believe a child in your life could benefit from some thoughtful planning, often times an unbiased third-party can be a powerful tool! As an experienced educator and career coach, I sit down with students one-on-one, meet them where they are, and assist them as they articulate their goals and develop a plan to achieve them!