By CALEB FREY

Staff Reporter

RESERVE – The Crystal Bottling Plant on Tulane Avenue in New Orleans took quite a beating from Hurricane Katrina, but has managed to find a new facility in Reserve creating 150 new jobs for local residents.

Baumer Foods, Inc., makers of Crystal products such as their world famous hot sauce, held a job fair at the River Parishes Louisiana Technical College in an effort to fill the reopening plant’s vacant positions.

Crystal already has 50 employees from the Tulane plant returning, but is seeking to fill about 150-180 positions for skilled and unskilled workers to return the plant back to its pre-Katrina workforce of about 230 employees, according to Human Resources Manager Karen Carman.

The job fair was well received Carman said. So much that she actually had to get more applications printed halfway through the fair.

&#8220We’re going to hire about 120 production employees and the majority of those people we’re hoping to hire from our job fair today,” Carman said. &#8220I ran out of applications and I probably had about 250.” She said they had already seen nearly 300 applicants already in the first three hours.

The Reserve plant is scheduled to open in early to mid August in the old Constar Plastics Factory on West 10th St., according to Carman. Crystal products are sold in more than 80 countries across the world, Carman said, but the Tulane plant was unique because it was the only one in the company to handle all of the Crystal products under one roof.

&#8220I just learned today we were handling over 1,000 labels pre-Katrina,” Carman said.

More information on Baumer Foods can be found on the web at www.baumerfoods.com.