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Moving away from a Jersey City matzah plant was no easy task for the Manischewitz Company last Passover, but America's largest producer of processed kosher food had a much smoother holiday season this time around.

A series of kinks with machinery at its new facility in Newark caused a slew of problems for Manischewitz in 2008, including a severe matzah shortage and the cancellation of its famous Tam Tams Passover crackers. Now that the plant is fully operational, cracker aficionados can breathe a sigh of relief.

"It was quite a bumpy ride getting here," said Rabbi Yaakov Horowitz, head mashgiach at Manischewitz for the last 12 years. "These are very finely tuned machines, so you have to get them running just right. Now, we are running on all cylinders as far as production is concerned."

Manischewitz previously produced all matzah, crackers, and cake in Jersey City, canned soups and gefilte fish at a wet facility in Vineland, and cookies and macaroons at Rokeach's Newark plant. But once Manischewitz owner RAP Food Group also acquired Rokeach, it only made sense to consolidate production under one roof.

The result was the world's most comprehensive matzah factory, which took two years to build and opened at 80 Avenue K in Newark (in place of Rokeach's old plant) in December 2007 after Manischewitz's Jersey City factory closed that spring.

The company still has a significant Hudson County presence with corporate headquarters located in Secaucus. In Newark, the new matzah line is worth $14 million and has 40 suppliers worldwide for parts and machinery, just a few of the staggering statistics rolling off Horowitz's tongue.

"If this matzah oven would run 24/7, it has the capacity to put out 50,000 miles of matzah side-to-side, or two trips across the globe worth," he added.

Last Passover's matzah shortage meant that Manischewitz only shipped out 1.6 million boxes and sold a very limited amount of shmurah matzah, but this season the company anticipates sales to reach about 48,000 boxes of shmurah in addition to 3 million boxes of regular matzah.

The core business lies in "Matzah Fives," which are 30-pound orders of matzah for retailers split into six units with five 1-pound boxes each. In past years, supermarkets requested large quantities of matzah in December to generate store traffic, offering free Matzah Fives to customers who made large purchases. However, most stores were more bottom-line oriented in the midst of this year's economic downturn, ordering matzah no earlier than mid-January to avoid the possibility of leftovers.

"Everyone is cognizant of minimizing waste and tying up inventory in this economy," said Randall Copeland, vice president of operations at Manischewitz. "Instead of buying early and holding inventory, people are really holding onto their cash."

But the recession hasn't hurt every aspect of sales, Copeland said, as demand has increased for Manischewitz's crushed matzah meal products because consumers are looking to save money by cooking at home instead of buying finished goods.

"(The economy) shifted sales from one group of products to another," Copeland said.

Since consumer demand when Passover rolls along is unpredictable year-to-year, Manischewitz starts producing matzah well in advance between the months of August and February, Horowitz said.

On a tour of the matzah line, Copeland explained that trucks bring kosher flour to the Newark plant in 50,000-pound silos from the Lancaster region of Pennsylvania, while special flour for shmurah matzah comes from upstate New York. The flour is refined in 55 seconds per batch by a computerized process, and then is rolled by machines into a continuous sheet of thick dough, which subsequently gets thinned for proper texture.

During "docking," a series of holes are made in the dough for better air circulation and to limit bubbles for consistency purposes, Copeland said, followed by the formation of cracker or matzah shapes in the dough.

Baking takes place in a 150-foot-long oven with thee separate zones and 138 burners, each of which can be individually controlled for time, temperature, and humidity. A matzah cracker is in the oven for two and a half minutes, and matzah stays in for slightly under four minutes, Copeland said.

The matzah is either cooled and broken into individual pieces, or re-routed to a pipe that sends it to the mill room, where it is crushed and granulated for products such as farfel, egg meal, or standard matzah meal.

"If you don't have matzah meal, you don't have any of the rest of the plant running," Copeland said.

The Newark plant has superior technology to the previous Jersey City location in that computers set up the roll stands for the matzah, instead of workers performing the time-consuming tasks of turning knobs and making adjustments, Copeland said. Computers at the new factory also deal with flour handling, pulling it from specific silos instead of workers opening manual valves like they did in Jersey City.

Additionally, the Newark facility is a much more convenient and easy to manage one-level factory compared with the narrow five-story building at the Jersey City site, where machines had to convey ingredients from floor to floor.

Of course, avoiding a matzah shortage or a Tam Tam crisis makes things easier, too.