After the overripe fruit is eliminated there is little or no waste in canning pineapple. As the boxes are taken from the freight cars into the factory, the “pines,” as they are usually termed, are stripped of their green ends by the trimmers, and these ends are planted for the rattoon crop. The pineapple yields two crops, requiring, like sugar, eighteen months to mature the first crop, the second, or rattoon, crop being ready for harvest in twelve months. Sometimes the trimming is done before the fruit is shipped from the plantations, in which case it is ready when received at the cannery for the coring and peeling machine. This machine is operated by men, and calls for considerable sureness of eye to secure the largest number of perfect pineapples for slicing. If the fruit is at all soft, however, it is split into two and sometimes three parts in this process, and is then used for grated pineapple, which is also made of the slices too imperfect for canning, the odds and ends from the slicing machine, and the fruit which still adheres to the peeling. These are accumulated in tubs, taken to the screening machine, which reduces it to the consistency of the grated pineapple, used principally at soda fountains. The grated pulp is received in a wooden vat running the length of the screen, and is conducted automatically from this vat into tubs. From these tubs the pulp is poured in bulk into cooking vats, where it is mixed with the sweetening syrup. From the cooking vats it is automatically fed into large cans, gallon or half-gallon, these cans in turn being automatically sealed and put into a cooling bath, after which they are sent to the labeling room. After the pineapples are peeled and cored they go through a second trimming process with a pruning knife, by means of which all the “eyes” and small pieces of peeling are removed. They are then placed in the slicing machine, from which the slices are automatically deposited onto a traveling web band about ten inches wide, moving at a medium rate of speed along the centre of the packing tables, which are about thirty feet long. On each side of the moving web are wooden shelves, the one immediately in front of the packer being used as a sorting tray. On the shelf back of the web are arranged the trays of empty cans, each tray stamped with the grade of fruit it is to hold. Above this shelf is a second one, on which are empty trays to receive the cans of fruit as they are packed. As soon as a tray is filled with a dozen cans, it is taken away by a man to be filled with syrup and cooked.