How toothpicks are made

A toothpick begins as one thin sheet of birch, peeled off a spinning log the way a paper towel comes off its roll.

stations: 6
things upstream: 1
raw source: 1
step from the ground: 1

The short version

Birch logs are stripped of bark and then peeled, like unrolling a roll of paper, into one long thin sheet of wood. A puncher stamps toothpick shapes out of the sheet at great speed. The soft picks are baked hard in a dryer, tumbled with talcum powder to polish them, sifted for damaged ones, and counted into boxes.

Strip off the bark

Grippers lift birch logs into a debarker, which makes two passes with a blade and leaves a smooth cylinder of bare wood.

Goes in
Timber
Peel a paper-thin sheet

The log is spun against a row of blades that unravel it into a continuous sheet about a millimeter thick, in the same way a paper towel unrolls.
Punch the picks

The sheet is gathered into a billet, which is carried to a puncher. It cuts identical toothpick strips at great speed, and the result is a pile of small soft picks.
Bake them hard

The soft picks go into a dryer for hours until the wood sets firm.

12 hours
Tumble with talc

Friction and talcum powder polish the picks and round off rough points. The tumbling takes several hours.

four hours
Sift, count and pack

A sifter shakes out broken picks. A blower and conveyor count the good ones into boxes.

End of the lineToothpick

Worth repeating

The toothpick is the oldest tool for cleaning teeth, and lesions on 1.8-million-year-old remains from Dmanisi, Georgia, are thought to come from one.
The first toothpick-making machine was built in 1869 by Marc Signorello.