On an 80-degree Friday afternoon in July, at a factory just outside Buffalo, it was snowing.
But this was not your run-of-the-mill frozen water vapor.
This snow started as a 400-pound roll of plastic film, which was fed into a steel drum lined with blades that thrashed the material into particles the size of popcorn kernels. The shredded bits then drifted down a turquoise chute into a cardboard box, forming a soft white mound of what looked like freshly fallen snow.
The process was handled by workers in the Flakes Department, one of several teams at the factory in Depew, where the holiday decoration brand Buffalo Snow has been manufacturing blizzards annually since the 1980s.
Natural snow, an indelible part of wintertime scenery, has in many places been in short supply lately because of rising temperatures. When Old Man Winter fails, Buffalo Snow, one of the few companies manufacturing fake snow in the United States, can help conjure a wintry atmosphere with a 24-ounce bag of downy snow (about $6), or a sparkling white Christmas tree skirt (about $3).
Buffalo Snow’s artificial snow is made from plastic materials contorted to various degrees of softness and sparkle. Its products can be found on shelves at Walmart and Michael’s stores, at malls’ North Pole setups, in department stores’ holiday windows and on movie sets: According to The Buffalo News, the snow was used in “Home Alone.”
Getting those products ready for peak season takes all summer. From June to October, the factory manufactures snow almost exclusively to ensure it reaches shelves in time for the Christmas rush. The rest of the year, the facility mostly produces fiberfill stuffing, much of which is used for mattresses, pillows and toys.
“We would not be able to survive on snow alone,” said Jeffrey Kumm, the vice president of retail sales for Fibrix, the fiber and foam company that owns Buffalo Snow.
About a million pounds of Buffalo Snow are produced at the factory each year, said Mr. Kumm, 67, who estimated that snow products make up roughly half of the facility’s production and bring in more than $7 million in sales.
He and his colleagues like to say that the fake-snow business abides by two rules.
“Ship it on time,” Mr. Kumm said, “and make sure it’s white.”
A Reputation for Snow
In a second-floor conference room where the air-conditioner was set to 65 degrees, Mr. Kumm laid a sleigh’s worth of Buffalo Snow products out on a table. The brand has so many versions of its signature product that it appears to be running out of ways to name them.
Its main offering, a cobwebby net of snow simply called “Buffalo Snow,” can be supplemented with large, translucent flakes (“Frosty Snow”); smaller, matte flakes that look like breadcrumbs (“Snow Flurries”); or shimmery flakes sized somewhere in between (“Iridescent Sprinkles”). For people who want to simulate more snow coverage, there are the sheetlike “Snow-Tex Sparkling Christmas Drape” and “Buffalo Blizzard Blanket.”
The Iridescent Sprinkles are staticky and can cling to clothes and skin during the packaging process, said Kathleen Casper, 55, the human resources manager at Fibrix, who was speaking from experience. “You look like you’ve been out at a club,” she said.
The idea for Buffalo Snow emerged when Charles Buhsmer, then the president of Buffalo Batt and Felt, which made mattress and furniture cushioning at the factory, was brainstorming with a colleague on a snowy day about 40 years ago.
“It was snowing like the devil — there was three feet of snow on the sidewalks,” Mr. Buhsmer, now 86 and retired, recalled in a phone interview. They joked that they should sell a version of the company’s white stuffing around Christmastime as decorative snow.
Buffalo Snow went on sale in 1986; a decade later, it was being used in holiday displays in more than a third of shopping malls around the country, according to a 1996 article in The Buffalo News.
Mr. Buhsmer said he believed that the brand’s association with a city known for heavy snowfall in western New York added to its appeal.
Even as rising global temperatures have resulted in less snow in many cities, Buffalo has still been pummeled. Close to six feet of snow fell there last winter, according to the National Weather Service, and a four-day blizzard in 2022 killed at least 40 people in the area.
In the years since Buffalo Snow was acquired by its current owner in 2014, the brand has undergone changes. Some of its raw materials are now manufactured in China, then sent to New York for processing.
The company has also experimented with decorative products for other holidays, like when Mr. Kumm tried to crack the $12 billion Halloween market by selling “Halloween Hay” — his name for bags of snow that had been dyed black and neon orange.
“We don’t sell a lot of it,” he said.
‘I Don’t Even Want to Look at the Stuff’
Fibrix employs about 35 year-round workers at the factory and hires an additional 35 seasonal workers during peak snowmaking season. Cyd Cruz, a year-round employee, often works in the Flakes Department, sweeping up excess snow and supplying the machines with a never-ending feed of plastic film.
Ms. Cruz, 36, who lives in Buffalo, said the Flakes Department usually makes more than 2,500 bags of snow a day. Most of the product winds up in packaging, but not all of it. “It gets in my clothes, my shoes,” she said. “My shirt, my socks, my hair.”
Ms. Cruz has worked at the factory for five years; Marty Meiler had been there for 48 before retiring this month. Mr. Meiler, 68, was the head of maintenance at the facility, a position he had worked his way up to after starting as an employee on the loading dock in 1976. He said the artificial snow clogs up factory equipment as often as it gets stuck in employees’ hair.
“It gets caught in chains and stuff like that, so you have to blow down the machinery every night,” Mr. Meiler said.
When his wife decorates their home in nearby Lancaster, N.Y., for Christmastime, she skips the snow. “I don’t even want to look at the stuff,” Mr. Meiler said. “Not when you work with it five days a week.”
John Brandano, the president of Brandano Displays Inc., a commercial decorating company in Margate, Fla., has been using Buffalo Snow blankets to decorate office lobbies and shopping centers since the late 1980s. Back then, people would sometimes dirty the snow by tossing their cigarette butts into it.
“People use a lot of the snow blankets in Florida,” he said. “I think they’re celebrating their happiness that they don’t have to shovel.”
Steve Mayfield, the owner of Country Christmas Loft, a 14-room emporium of holiday décor in Shelburne, Vt., estimated that more than 100 customers buy Buffalo Snow each year to use as the base of their Christmas village scenes.
“A lot of people come in looking for something that says ‘Buffalo Snow’ on the package,” said Mr. Mayfield, who likened the brand’s name recognition among passionate decorators to that of Kleenex or Q-Tips.
Many of those customers return year after year to replenish their supply, he added. While Buffalo Snow does not melt, it is not usually reused because it gets so easily discolored by dust and dirt.
“People don’t want yellow snow,” said Mr. Kumm of Fibrix.
He is aware that Buffalo Snow contributes to the immense waste generated during the holiday season. American households can produce 25 percent more garbage between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, according to the E.P.A. Discarded holiday materials often end up in landfills, which are among the largest sources of human-related methane emissions in the United States, according to the National Environmental Education Foundation. Methane, a planet-warming gas, has been recognized as a cause of rising global temperatures.
In the early 2000s, Buffalo Snow began offering a corn-based snow product that cost about three times as much as the polyester version. (Small amounts are still sold, labeled not as snow but as fiberfill.) It also introduced “Eco Flurries,” a product made of potato starch that could be dissolved in water. But that item was discontinued after disappointing sales.
People rarely stop to consider that fake snow does not just fall from the sky, said Melissa Strong, 56, who has worked at the factory in Depew for 20 years. Ms. Strong likes telling people that her job is to make snow that the holiday season depends on.
She might be biased, but she prefers artificial snow to the real thing. “I enjoy the beauty of it,” she said, adding that she has found Buffalo Snow stuck to the inside of her bathtub months after a holiday season has ended.
“I bring it home,” she said. “But who doesn’t bring their work home with them?”
The post A Place Where It Snows All Summer appeared first on New York Times.
