Passover begins on Monday, which means matzo manufacturers have been working overtime to meet the seasonal demand. That includes the Streit’s matzo factory on the Lower East Side, which operates 20 hours a day during the final Passover production push. With this year’s run of Passover matzos finally produced and on store shelves, Streit’s vice president, Aron Yagoda, could afford to relax and reminisce during a recent afternoon.

Although the company makes and sells matzos year-round, about 60% of its matzo sales take place during the period leading up to Passover. “It’s not quite the same as a company that makes Halloween costumes, where the whole season is one day, but Passover is a huge part of our business,” Mr. Yagoda, the great-grandson of the company founder, Aron Streit, said.

Streit’s is New York’s largest matzo production facility, and has operated at the corner of Rivington and Suffolk streets since 1925. The plant and its methods haven’t changed much in its 80-plus years. The production of a given year’s Passover matzos, which require a higher degree of rabbinical supervision, begins the previous fall, when the factory machinery is taken apart and brought out to the sidewalk, where it’s koshered by a crew of orthodox rabbis wielding steam cleaners and torches.

“The way everything was laid out is still pretty much the way we use it today,” Mr. Yagoda said. “Back then it was state of the art; now it’s just art.”

That last comment is part of a rapid-fire shtick that could easily land Mr. Yagoda’s a spot on the Borscht Belt circuit. But it also reflects the challenges facing a manufacturing operation using antiquated equipment on a narrow Manhattan street.

“No one would come here and start out the way we do things now,” Mr. Yagoda said. “Some of our machines still depend on gravity to move things around. If someone’s double-parked, we can’t get a truck down the street. There’s no room to unload, so you end up putting stuff out on the sidewalk. Truck drivers have to go five blocks down just to make a right turn.”

On this particular day, the factory was making “daily matzos” — kosher, but not Passover-approved — and, like any bakery, smelled wonderful. Matzos are simply flour and water, so the process is fairly straightforward: The flour is mixed with water on the second floor under the watchful eye of a mashgiach rabbi (there are six of them on the premises during Passover production, two at other times). The resulting dough is then fed down to a ground-floor conveyor belt, where it arrives as a wide, flat, continuous sheet, sort of like a giant tongue.

Several rollers flatten the dough further, and then a series of stipplers and perforators add the product’s telltale track mark patterns. From there dough is fed into the 900-degree oven, where it makes its 72-foot journey in 90 to 100 seconds. Under Jewish anti-leavening laws, this process, from the water touching the flour to the dough entering the oven, must take no longer than 18 minutes.

This system can produce 30,000 pounds of matzos a day — enough to make Streit’s the nation’s second-biggest matzo brand, after Manischewitz — as long as the ancient machinery is cooperating. “When something breaks, we have to make our own spare parts,” Mr. Yagoda said. “This is not something you can service at Home Depot.”

Once the large sheets emerge from the oven, workers use the perforations to break down the matzos into their more familiar retail size and then place them in a series of hanging metal baskets that appear to be straight out of Willy Wonka’s factory. The baskets make a rickety, 10-minute journey back to the second floor, where a worker loads the matzos onto a continuous-run packaging machine, a thankless job Mr. Yagoda likened to “the ‘I Love Lucy’ episode with the bonbons.”

The very notion of machine-made matzos was unheard of back in the late 1800s, when Aron Streit came from Austria to America and started making matzos by hand on Pitt Street. It was Rabbi Dov Behr Manischewitz of Cincinnati who saw the potential in mass-produced, machine-made matzos. When local religious authorities objected (the thinking at the time was that the consciousness of the person making the matzo was essential to the finished product), he hired his own board of rabbis, who certified his matzos as kosher. This was the beginning of the Manischewitz brand, and of matzos’ transformation from a local artisanal item into a high-volume product suitable for widespread retail sale — a crucial development as Jewish enclaves spread across America.

Matzo varieties have spread, too. Streit’s now offers a wide range of flavors and formulations, including organic, whole wheat, five grain, spelt, and “Mediterranean” (made with olive oil, garlic, and sun-dried tomatoes). Do some old-school types in the company object to these newfangled offerings? “Yeah,” Mr. Yagoda said. “We call those people family.”

That family tension has also been brought to bear on a more divisive question: whether to move the company to a more modern facility outside of the city.

“In terms of economics, it makes sense to move,” Mr. Yagoda said. “But there’s a lot of emotion tied to this factory, a lot of history. People come by and say, ‘My mother used to come here,’ or ‘My grandmother used to come down here,’ and that’s always nice. So it’s a touchy subject.”

For now, though, the company is staying put, so expect to see the rabbis out on the sidewalk again this October, cleaning the equipment for next year’s Passover matzos.

“The tricky part is putting everything back together after they clean it,” Mr. Yagoda joked, gearing up for another punch line. “We usually end up with a few extra pieces.”