HORSE CAVE — They are cooking all kinds of stuff at T. Marzetti. When local people eat – perhaps they peel back a sauce pouch or bend an elbow to dress a salad – there’s a good chance they consume a product made by Marzetti.

There are three weekday shifts and two weekend shifts at the Hart County manufacturing facility, said Steve Blackburn, senior plant manager. On Friday morning, the numbers were enlarged by applicants for a job fair. Blackburn said 200 people turned out for the last job fair.

“We are finding good, quality people,” Blackburn said. Marzetti’s success stems from its quality, customer satisfaction and the popularity of the recognizable brand, he said.

As workers punch in each shift, a large sign above the time clock outlines their marching orders.

“People first, customers always,” it begins. It asks workers to continually improve plant safety, be positive and provide low-cost, high-quality products.

“That pretty much sums it up,” Blackburn said.

In a given month, 1 million cases of everything Marzetti manufactures head out of the facility, produced by the nearly 500-person workforce that has been growing – 120 new hires in the last three to four months – said Blackburn, a 35-year veteran of the Columbus, Ohio-based company.

Hart County Judge-Executive Terry Martin said Marzetti provides good-paying jobs to Hart County residents – jobs that pay nearly $17 an hour.

Martin is working on a way to get that message into the Caverna Independent School District classrooms, where freshmen ponder which career path they might choose.

Martin said students could work with computer simulators to prepare them for a career at Marzetti, where hair-netted men and women use computer touch screens next to the various machines to compile the customers’ products. Blackburn said someone in Columbus prepares the recipes, and the machines are calibrated so that movement from one step in the process to another can’t occur until it is supposed to.

During a plant tour Friday, Martin talked with former students or players on his sports teams when he was coaching.

“He’s a good man. He’s always been available when we asked him for something,” Blackburn said of Martin.

A hiring spurt at Marzetti will increase employees from 498 to 530. Next door, a Marzetti sister company, Sister Schubert’s, which makes bread products, employs 230 people.

Marzetti completed an expansion in November 2014 that enlarged the operation from six to 10 kitchens, the growth spurred by one customer that has increased orders by more than 20 percent. Marzetti doesn’t reveal its customers, Blackburn said. Suffice it to say, the Hart County plant makes far more than its trademark dressing found in local grocery stores.

Sauces, dips and other items roll out of the various machines, some with recognizable labels, others without labels.

Marzetti’s Hart County plant is its newest, coming to Kentucky in 2006. Sister Schubert’s followed a year later. Both complexes cover about 385,000 square feet combined. Blackburn said Marzetti has four dressing plants in America, each running seven days a week. In the Horse Cave plant, workers come from north of Elizabethtown in Hardin County and south from Bowling Green and Smiths Grove in Warren County.

Inside the Marzetti walls, 10,000-gallon towers are filled with different ingredients, some at 40 degrees, while others are kept in a warm room. For example, chilled buttermilk is in the cold room, while corn syrup sits in the warm one.

About 100 tractor-trailers come to the plant complex each day. Martin said the truck traffic coming into the industrial park is so plentiful that officials are exploring an exit right off Interstate 65 because the drivers sometimes get lost on the two-lane roads when they exit off the highway to Horse Cave.

That’s 27 trucks a month just hauling hot sauce, a key ingredient in one customer’s product, Blackburn said.

Blackburn said the amount of trucks coming to the plant means he’s envisioning an expanded parking lot someday.

“I don’t think people know how busy we are here,” he said.

At peak times, like Thanksgiving, the plant had already been gearing up for months, he said. “We start in May preparing for Thanksgiving.”

— Follow business reporter Charles A. Mason on Twitter at twitter.com/BGDNbusiness or visit bgdailynews.com.