Tesseract-OCR gem (works in development but not production)

gem "tesseract-ocr" works wonders in development allowing me to get the relevant text out of an image. However, when I deploy to AWS elastic beanstalk, my entire app renders a blank white screen.

I am curious to know why this gem will NOT work in production, yet another gem such as paperclip does.

I am also curious to know why the gem's failure to run results in a blank screen and not simply an error message?

My main question, though, is how do I get the tesseract-ocr gem working in production on my rails app??

I was using this article as a reference:

http://ift.tt/1GcVvsq

which is incredibly helpful, but I need another perspective to fully understand the issue.