If the Winds Are in Your Favor, the Woodlawn Neighborhood Will Smell Like Chocolate Chip Cookies

It’s the best industrial emissions you could possibly dream of, courtesy of the Nabisco factory.

Chips Ahoy
By Sophie Peel

The smell of warm chocolate chip cookies in the Woodlawn neighborhood isn’t a guarantee. It’s unpredictable and entirely dependent on wind patterns on any given day. But if you spend enough time there, and if conditions are in your favor, the smell of melting chocolate chips wafts through the entire neighborhood. For a brief moment, you are back to childhood bliss.

That’s because the Nabisco factory in North Portland is baking Chips Ahoy! cookies almost 24 hours per day, according to a Nabisco employee. (He says it’s the factory’s highest-demand product.)

That factory, a mile north of Woodlawn, was the site of a monthlong strike last fall. Its parent company, Mondelez International, brought in strikebreakers in buses but struggled to keep up with production as strikers and local activists blocked incoming supply trains from reaching the factory.

But damn, do its family-size Chips Ahoy! cookies smell good.

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