We are, without doubt, a nation of chocolate lovers.
We eat, each of us, on average, this much chocolate every year.
'That's a whopping 266 bars each.'
And the British love affair with chocolate begins here,
Liverpool port.
Around 70,000 tonnes of cocoa beans arrive into the UK every year.
They're trucked to factories all over Britain
and they're used to feed our insatiable sweet tooth.
But how do you produce chocolate on this scale?
Whoa!
We've come to one of the world's largest chocolate makers
to find out.
'I'm Gregg Wallace...'
I love chocolate.
Whey!
'And I've been given exclusive access to this giant factory
in York...'
Oh, my word.
'..to reveal how they make over seven million bars in one day.'
How much of a chocolate geek have you become?
Well, if I went on Mastermind
I reckon I could get through that quite easy.
'I'm Cherry Healey and I'm going to get hands-on
'on a production line in Derbyshire.'
What is this Willie Wonka contraption?
And historian Ruth Goodman will delve into the factory archives
and meet the people who found love on the production line.
And I said, "I'd love to take him to bed and cuddle him..."
cos he was like a teddy bear.
From bean to bar, we're going to follow the amazing journey
of one of our bestselling chocolates.
You'll never look at a chocolate bar the same way again.
This is the incredible story of the factories that feed Britain.
This is the Nestle factory in York.
It's one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world.
800 production staff work around the clock to produce
millions of bars a day which go to every corner of the UK and Ireland.
On this site, we'll see how raw cocoa beans arrive by truck and
leave just 24 hours later as chocolate bars
ready for the supermarket.
And tonight, I'll be following the journey of the Kit Kat.
This is one of the most popular chocolate bars in the world.
We eat one billion of these every year in the UK alone.
'That's a staggering 1,900 every single minute.'
But whether you like your chocolate dark, milk or white
it all starts with the cocoa bean.
Every day, 120 tonnes of them arrive at the bean processing plant
to start the production.
I'm going to roll up my sleeves
and help cocoa bean expert Steve Calpin unload his latest delivery.
He's been here for over 40 years and has worked everywhere
from the chocolate production line to the maintenance department.
So, Steve, you pretty much are at the start
of the whole chocolate bar process?
This is where it all starts.
The beans get driven in here, we process them,
start making chocolate.
Do you know how many beans are on this truck?
I've never actually counted them but I think there'll be about 28 tonne.
Just short of 30 tonne? Just short of 30 tonne.
Let me help you unload them.
We've hooked it up to the electric, now what?
We just need to push the button
and start off-loading the beans into the system.
Can I press the button? Yes.
Whey! That's an avalanche of beans!
In just 24 hours, these beans will undergo
an incredible transformation
and leave York as finished chocolate bars.
But their journey began thousands of miles away.
90% of British chocolate begins life as cocoa beans in West Africa.
The main harvest of pods from cocoa trees happens in March.
Once the beans have been collected they're dried in the African sun
for seven days and then packed and shipped to the UK.
GREGG LAUGHS
It looks like a handful of grubby pebbles. Yeah.
So this has literally been transported
straight from the Ivory Coast. Straight from the Ivory Coast.
And these have dried by the road so they've got bits of grit in it...
They've got bits of grit... Dirt. Yeah. We've had shoes, snakes...
Really? Yeah.
'Now the beans begin a nonstop three-hour ride.'
'The aim is to crack their hard outer shell
'and release the cocoa-rich centre.'
Come on.
'But first, they need to be cleaned.'
'Specially-sized holes in metal plates allow the beans
'to fall through but capture larger pieces of rubbish on top.'
It separates all the string and bits of rubbish.
I get it.
The beans you want drop through but anything bigger stays.
And that's the way. Brilliant.
But it's not just grit and rubbish that have hitched a ride
over from Africa with the beans,
sometimes there's treasure.
I tend to get coins. Get yourself a drink.
Thanks, mate. Do I have to go to the Ivory Coast to buy one?
To the Ivory Coast, yeah.
Next up is the de-shelling.
What happens here,
we have a series of rollers in this machine here
and as the beans go through, it crushes them
and takes the shell off the nib.
The nib in the centre of the bean is the Holy Grail of chocolate making.
It contains all the cocoa solids and fats
that are the basis of chocolate.
There you are, Gregg. That's the nib?
That's the nib.
'The last remaining shell pieces are vacuumed off the nibs
'and the clean ones are fed into three giant ovens...and roasted.'
The temperature of the ovens
is so critical to the recipe, it's kept a closely guarded secret.
After an hour, the roasted nibs
are fed into a giant food processor...
..which transforms them into a thick brown liquid called liquor.
The thing that's made it liquid like that
is the fat that's come out of the nib.
The same way that oil comes out of an olive,
your fat's coming out of the chocolate nib?
That's correct.
Have you added anything at all to this nib?
Just a bit of love and care and attention.
We all need a bit of that, mate. I know.
Eight tonnes of cocoa liquor is now piped
from the bean processing plant to the factory next door.
Here they will turn the bitter thick liquid into hundreds of tonnes
of sweet milk chocolate.
First it needs to be mixed with the other ingredients.
Sean Conricode is the factory's chocolate specialist
and has been the keeper of recipes for over 38 years.
All those stainless steel vessels contain our liquid ingredients.
So there's cocoa liquor, cocoa butter,
vegetable fat and then we take all our dry ingredients so sugar...
our milk component...are all fed across into this mixer.
The result is a coarse, chocolaty powder
churned out at a rate of nine tonnes an hour.
Conveyor belts drop the mixed ingredients
into the top of a giant, heated blender, called a conch.
'After seven to eight hours of mixing
'those ingredients will be pumped out as liquid chocolate.'
The smell in here - it's so strong.
It's very distinctive.
So that's the cooked aroma of chocolate I can smell.
It's like consuming, it's like it's almost... Well, it's heady.
It is. Smell is just as important as taste
so the chocolate's got to smell right as well as taste right.
'But what makes up that smell?
'While I help Sean prepare the chocolate,
'Cherry's in Reading to find out the secret
'behind that unique chocolate aroma.'
Yes, please, thank you.
'Food scientist Ashleigh Stuart
'spends hours every day sniffing chocolate.'
You are a PhD student studying chocolate.
Is that the best job in the world? Yeah, I think it could be.
'Ashleigh thinks the reason we love chocolate so much is the smell.'
If you try the chocolate dessert while you're holding your nose
you shouldn't get very much flavour at all.
It's got a great texture. I can taste that it's sweet.
And then if you unblock your nose,
the flavour should suddenly hit you. Oh, yeah.
That's really good. Wow.
'Like coffee or fine wine,
'chocolate has hundreds of different smells
'that make up the aroma we recognise.'
To help me discover some of those individual smells,
Ashleigh has an instrument called an olfactometer
that can separate them out.
So you'll get all of the compounds individually
rather than all in one go.
'She gently warms the chocolate to release the smell molecules inside
'and then captures them.
'These smells are then fed through a tube one after another.'
You should be able to smell some quite strange things.
Oh, there's something.
That is really yummy, it's like...butter popcorn.
That's really delicious.
It's a little bit earthy...
Moss?
Well, it's a mushroomy compound... Oh, mushrooms.
Once you know, it's really obvious.
Raw potato.
Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah.
'These molecules are not added to the chocolate,
'they're found naturally in the ingredients
'and some of them aren't very pleasant.'
I want to say burnt rubber.
Eurgh! What is that?!
That is smelly feet.
Like worse than after I've been to the gym smelly feet.
Bleurgh!
That one stinks. It's a very stinky cheese.
In fact, the smell of chocolate is made up of a whole host
of different molecules.
Nutty, popcorny, woody...
And then you've got some of the horrible ones
that you've just smelt, the cheesy, the sweaty feet.
But they're all in there.
And when you're smelling chocolate as a whole,
all of those different smells are hitting it all at once
and it's the combination that gives you the smell of chocolate.
That's amazing.
And that's the job of a chocolate maker,
to design each part of their process so they release the different smells
that combine to create the chocolate aroma we all love.
After cooking in the conches for seven hours,
the liquid chocolate is pumped out into giant vats.
And I cannot wait to taste it.
So that batch of chocolate will end up in this tank here.
How many Kit Kats in here?
This storage tank holds 28 tonnes of chocolate
so you can make two million.
That tank will empty and fill again today.
Four million a day?
Yeah. Put your sample jar under there and just unwind that.
Whoa, whoa-whoa-whoa, how do I...?
GREGG LAUGHS
And here we are. Here we are.
We've got 28 tonnes of liquid chocolate
and a very happy, bald television presenter.
Fantastic. Do you sell it by the pint?
Unfortunately, we don't sell it by the pint,
we sell it by the bar.
They make 16 different chocolate recipes here at the factory,
a different one for each product.
But what I don't understand is, why do they bother?
Why not just get one great recipe and use it for all of them?
Vicky Geal is the senior confectioner
in charge of developing new flavours and products.
And she's going to show me
why the chocolate recipe is so important.
Kit Kat chocolate is designed specifically for Kit Kat.
What I've done here is made some with some different chocolates
to prove that other chocolates do not work.
What different chocolates?
The first one, I've used a standard Kit Kat chocolate.
The second one is a Yorkie chocolate
and the third one is a competitor chocolate which I shall not name.
See which you think's the best.
Well, I can't really taste the chocolate on this one.
Let me try the middle one.
The chocolate's...creamier...
rounded...deeper.
Let me try the last one.
That's the Kit Kat, that's the original Kit Kat.
That is the original... Whey-hey-hey!
The insides are exactly the same on every product,
it's just the chocolate that's changed.
You've made your point, Vicky. There you go.
In a delightful way. Let's have a hug.
So, it turns out, even without realising it,
we consumers expect a certain chocolate flavour
to be on a particular bar.
So to keep us happy, this factory uses a number
of different chocolate recipes, each tailor-made
for the product it's going to end up in.
This 28 tonnes of melted chocolate
is all going to end up making just one kind of chocolate bar.
But Cherry's getting her hands dirty in Derbyshire
to learn how you make a chocolate box
full of many different varieties.
I'm at Thornton's,
the largest British-owned chocolate manufacturer in the country.
They've been making chocolates for over 100 years
and produce a colossal 25 million boxes every year.
Most of the chocolate made at Thornton's ends up
in boxes like these.
And while your first thought might be to scramble for your favourite one
you might be surprised to know
how much work goes into making each and every one.
Over 1,000 people work in this Derbyshire factory
and today I'm getting stuck in too.
You need to put four blocks in.
Operations manager, Nathan Worth,
is teaching me to make a vanilla truffle.
I don't think even I could eat all this in a day.
Oh, I could easily.
'The truffle begins with the centre
'made from chocolate, sugar and butter.'
And now we'll mix it for a few minutes.
Oh, wow.
'100 kilos of filling needs to be handfed
'into the start of the production line.'
Oh, look at that massive blob.
That's it, I think we're going to lose you in there in a minute.
Bye.
It's like Willie Wonka's chocolate factory.
It's Willie Wonka without the Oompa-Loompas
and the chocolate fountain, I'm afraid.
'Then the mix is forced through a cutter,
'slicing into more centres than I've ever seen.'
How many of these are in one row?
So there's 16 rows on here. 16 rows.
And on this line, on this product we run 62 rows a minute.
So, an hour on here we're making 55,000 chocolates an hour.
In a week, we could be making up to 25 million.
That is a staggering number of chocolates.
Yeah, and I think I eat a large percentage of those
while I'm working.
I'm right there with you.
The centre gets individually drizzled with a drape of chocolate.
This is an enrober.
Enrobing is where we put a curtain of chocolate over the centres.
So what we're doing is, we're drizzling the chocolate over.
So instead of moulding it as a lot of people do,
we're actually coating the chocolate. Wow.
And the secret to perfect chocolate is a process called tempering.
So we take chocolate at 45 degrees,
cool that down to 25 degrees,
heat it back up to 30 degrees to get the correct crystal structure.
What would happen if you didn't heat up and cool the chocolate down?
What you'd find is it'd start going white, go a little bit greasy,
it wouldn't snap if it was a bar of chocolate and it wouldn't eat nice.
So sometimes you'll see chocolate that's gone a little bit grey,
that doesn't mean it's going mouldy,
it just means the crystal structure has broken down
and it's not how we want it to be.
Those grey bits are still perfectly safe to eat
but to keep their chocolate looking its best
all factories like this rely on their giant tempering machines.
In this kind of machine here that's behind you,
it's the workhorse of the factory
but, actually, nobody ever really sees it.
Oh, no, it's the unsung hero of your factory.
I appreciate you turbo ther...temper. NATHAN LAUGHS
I appreciate you.
Once the first milk chocolate layer cools and sets,
it's ready for a smothering of white chocolate.
The vibrating conveyor belt shakes off the excess chocolate
to make sure each one weighs exactly the same.
Wow. It's a river of chocolate.
'But what comes next is the real magic.
'Every one of the truffles is skilfully hand decorated,
'with not a machine in sight.'
CHERRY GASPS
Oh, wow.
It really is done by hand.
No machinery at this point.
And away you go.
Oh, that's really fun.
Oh, no, I messed it up. No, no, they're fine. Very good.
Ah-ah. Got it. It goes really quick.
I missed one... No problem.
You're going to have to pick up my slack.
That's no problem at all.
Do you think that people don't really appreciate
how much work goes into a piece of chocolate?
I think when people buy chocolates,
they don't realise how much we do do here.
I think they probably think a machine does this,
do you know what I mean? Yes.
Look at you go. I mean, you're a demon.
Years of practice. Years of practice.
How long have you been doing this? Well, I've worked here for 21 years.
21 years. So you're a pro?
I hope so by now.
Is it hard to be doing this and not take one?
It's extremely hard and I'm a total chocoholic.
I love it.
One down but they're still 11 varieties short of a chocolate box
so the team keep on going.
I'm blown away by the effort to hand decorate the chocolate
but I do worry for whoever has to pack them into boxes.
It turns out this is the one area where even humans need a hand.
A team of lightning-fast robots pack the chocolates into trays.
The robots have laser-guided eyes
that can tell the shape of each chocolate
and where it is on the conveyor belt.
They then rotate the chocolates to match them up exactly
with the shape in the trays.
This area last year did over 30 million finished boxes.
And they can do it with absolute precision -
over and over again.
Despite all the machinery and hi-tech robots,
it still takes over a 100 people to make a box of chocolate
like this one.
So think about that next time you're squabbling
over who gets the last one.
Later, I'll be back at Thornton's to reveal the secret
of how they make Easter eggs hollow.
Back in York, I've moved from the chocolate factory to wafers.
Wafer line manager Mark Barratt has worked here for over 20 years.
He used to make the chocolate, but for him now,
the filling is more than just the middle, it's everything.
What's better, chocolate or wafer?
Wafer. Why?
That's the beginning of it, that's the middle.
If you don't get that great snap, you haven't got the bar.
Do you think you might be turning into a bit of
a chocolate bar anorak, Mark?
I think I'm there. I've been there a while.
What is the first step to making wafer?
So we start off making a batter mix with flour and water
and a few...few pretty special ingredients
that we like to keep to ourselves.
Flour from giant silos outside is fed into the mixers.
These mixers work around the clock,
producing 40 kilos of batter every minute.
But mixing all that is one thing.
How on earth are you going to bake it all?
You start by piping it into 100 hinged waffle irons
called carriers.
The top of the carrier shuts down.
As it shuts down, the batter spreads and it fills the rectangle.
Got ya.
Conveyor belts take the squashed batter squares
directly into 100-foot-long ovens.
After just two minutes at 150 degrees, the carriers leave
the ovens, open up and spit out rich, golden wafers.
Oh! There they are, popping out.
Mate, they're like carpet tiles or they're like lino tiles.
Yeah.
Shall we have a look at one?
There you go.
It's like an enormous poppadom.
It doesn't seem that crispy.
No.
Sorry. I'll clean...I'll clean it up.
To crisp up the wafers, they're fed into a cooling rack,
snaking 30 feet into the air to save space.
Over an arch on the second floor.
Then back downstairs.
After cooling, they come down that ski slope, come along here
and then the filling is spread on top of the sheet.
The sweet filling is made of cocoa liquor and sugar.
It's like a perfectly precisely buttered piece of toast.
That's right.
The same level all the time, the same thickness.
Then the machine stacks one coated wafer
on top of another coated wafer.
OK. One, two, and then we've got some coming over the top
which haven't got filling on.
And the results, every five seconds, a perfectly lined-up square
of two layers of filling sandwiched between three layers of wafer.
Perfect every time?
Perfect every time, yeah.
Almost every time?
Almost. HE LAUGHS
A team of robots then stacks the wafers...
..cuts them into blocks...
..and then sends them off to be covered in chocolate.
It's hard to imagine a time without our favourite chocolate bars,
but where did they come from in the first place?
Historian Ruth Goodman's been looking at chocolate's magic decade.
One of the earliest memories we probably all share
is visiting the sweet shop.
It's usually the first time as children
we get to spend our own money.
But the chocolate bars we buy today are likely to be exactly
the same as those that our parents bought, or our grandparents,
even our great grandparents, when they were young.
They all originate in the same amazing ten-year period.
Roald Dahl once likened it as "the chocolate equivalent of the
"Italian Renaissance for painting." And that decade was the 1930s.
The 1930s witnessed a huge social shift in British society.
Improved working conditions meant people had more time off.
And this new concept of leisure time brought a shift in buying habits.
Until now, chocolate had been an expensive treat for the wealthy
and mostly only bought on special occasions.
In the '30s, cheaper manufacturing costs
meant it could be made for a lot less.
Suddenly, 90% of the country could now afford
to buy chocolate regularly.
A new mass market had been created at the beginning of the decade
and now it was up to the chocolatiers to feed it.
Amongst the first off the block was an American.
In 1932, the Mars Bar caused quite a stir.
A so-called combination bar,
it added a core to the standard chunk of chocolate that
Britain was used to.
An American invention, they were considered
low-rent and faddish by chocolate makers on this side of the Atlantic.
But British consumers had other ideas and happily scoffed them up.
The snobbery soon turned to envy as British manufacturers
realised that they would have to respond.
And so began what had been called "the chocolate wars."
Terry's gave us the Chocolate Orange in 1932.
Rowntree's responded with both the Aero and the Kit Kat in 1935.
Cadbury's contribution was the Whole Nut and Roses in 1938.
And Mars fought back with the Milky Way and Maltesers.
Suddenly the high street was choc-a-block with chocolate.
Chocolatiers knew that they couldn't rely just on their packaging
to sell their bars.
They needed to come up with some really
imaginative advertising campaigns.
"Where have you been to, sir?" she said.
I've been York milking, my pretty maid.
To entertain cinema audiences Rowntree's created a world first,
an animated advert with synchronised sound.
Ooh!
Mr York's York.
Isn't it lovely?
Nothing like this had been tried before to sell a product.
Not to be outdone, Cadbury's hit back.
At seaside resorts across the country,
Cadburys sent the chocolate mystery man.
If you spotted him roaming the streets,
you'd win a chocolaty prize.
In an unprecedented move,
Cadbury's even sent vans selling hot cocoa to busy public events.
Chocolate was everywhere.
Their hard work paid off.
By the end of the 1930s, Britain was the largest
consumer of confectionary in the world.
In the 1920s, the average Briton consumed 4oz
of confectionary a week.
By 1938, it had nearly doubled to a full 7oz...
..and the difference was chocolate.
Down through the generations we are still remarkably faithful
to these original brands first invented in the chocolate decade.
Here in York, we've gone bean to liquor to chocolate.
And now the filled wafers
are arriving in the final production hall by the thousands.
In this final stage,
all the elements of the chocolate bar are put together.
Phil Ashley, factory quality manager, is going to show me how.
Can you take me through the process?
Yeah, certainly. So, you've seen how we've made wafer
and you've seen how we make chocolate.
Well, this is the plant where we put both wafer and chocolate together.
The chocolate gets deposited into a mould.
You can see on the mould here
we have an impression on the bottom of the mould.
So when the chocolate gets deposited on there
and the bar finally gets de-moulded, you can see "Kit Kat" on the top.
Chocolate gets squirted in here? Yes.
It's travelling along. Then what happens?
Then we put the wafer into the mould itself.
And it's the job of Michelle Jarvis to load those wafers.
Michelle's been working on this line for 12 years.
Can I come in? Come on.
Could I have a go at this? Yes.
So, I've watched these wafers get made,
I watched the chocolate being made.
And now I want to put them in the machine,
see the whole thing happening.
Oh, oh, I can't...
You pick them all up, the whole row.
Pick them all up.
Like that. Don't be ridiculous.
Go on. Your turn.
Yay! Oh, yeah, baby! Oh, yeah, baby!
Call me Mr Wafer.
I'm leaving this to you and I'm going for tea.
If these go down to nothing, am I in trouble?
Yes. Bye!
Don't do that, please.
I'm not very confident.
Ah!
I've run out of biscuits!
The filled wafers are cut to size
and dropped into the moulds on top of the chocolate.
You can now see the chocolate underneath the wafer.
I don't know how the chocolate gets on top of the wafer.
OK, so we're going to move further down the plant to show you that.
Is that a laser at the end of that machine?
It is, yeah. This is a very clever piece of equipment.
This is the camera that's showing the wafers going through.
When there's a wafer missing, it shows up there in a red light.
Yeah, it's just nabbed one.
That's right. So now the machine knows exactly which bar that is.
Right at the end of the process then, it will reject that particular bar.
What's it done, made a recording, like, row 12, seat 137?
Exactly that. It's a computer, it'll remember all that information.
There's a misdemeanour here, the chocolate mould thinks it's got away
with it and it's going to get nabbed further on down the line there.
That's right.
This snack is gradually coming together.
What's the next stage?
OK, so now we put chocolate on the back of the bar.
Chocolate comes down the pipe, gets deposited here...
..and then just gets spread across the mould.
That's a beautiful thing.
That's like a chocolate tide crashing onto a beach. That's right.
How come the chocolate doesn't stick to the mould?
OK, well, that's the next important process.
If you just want to take hold of that mould.
Try and twist that.
No. No, it's solid, it's hard plastic.
If you look down here...
..can you see how those moulds are being twisted on either side?
Oh, yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, twisting it one way at one end,
the other way at the other end. Correct.
That's very much how we would get ice cubes out of an ice cube mould.
Exactly, yeah. Twisting it.
Absolutely. Except this plastic's quite tough.
Does it have to be that horrible pink colour?
It's pink so we can differentiate it with the chocolate.
So they're cool by now, aren't they? They are, yes.
They're cool and they're solid at this stage.
Give me a mould, I'll get them out.
While I'm helping to de-mould,
back at Thorntons in Derbyshire, Cherry is having a sugar rush.
Easter is second only to Christmas for chocolate sales,
and here at Thorntons they make over nine million eggs each year.
'They've been making Easter eggs here since 1922,
'but what I've wanted to know ever since I was a kid
'is how on earth do they make them hollow?'
What comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Well, when it comes to Easter eggs, it's actually the mould. Oh.
So what we do is...
we have a mould that we're going to actually form the egg in.
'Melted chocolate is squirted inside one half of the egg-shaped mould.
'Then decorations are added.'
We'll then put a second mould on top of the first.
We'll put that into a magnetic frame and we'll put it onto
one of these machines over here, called a spinner.
Wow.
So it's a chocolate wall installation.
'The moulds are rotated in every direction
'to thoroughly coat the inside with chocolate.'
Because chocolate keeps setting, it'll steadily build up a layer
of chocolate on the inside of that mould so it's really nice and even.
That will give you that perfect hollow shell.
'As the chocolate dries it sticks to the mould,
'leaving a void in the middle.'
So the machine mixes it around
and around and around?
Yeah. And then just let the chocolate move to the edges.
It's easier to put it on a machine
than stand there for 15 minutes doing that.
So we've had hollow eggs for a long time.
Has it always been done like this?
It's always been done by a spinning movement.
Right back in the early days when we first started doing hollow eggs.
'Before the eggs leave the factory...'
Ah, magic.
'..Nathan gives me one of the nine million to try.'
That's pretty good.
That is hot off the press.
You can't get a fresher Easter egg than that.
And it's definitely hollow. Yeah.
We've only got another 8,999,999 to go, then.
Back here on the production line in York,
the team are pumping out
3,000 two-fingered chocolate bars every minute.
Before they're loaded on trucks to come your way,
they need to be wrapped and packed.
But not before a final inspection
by quality control technician Julie Walker.
What are you doing? You seem to be throwing chocolates away.
We're picking off ones which are not of a good standard.
Do you know, they all look exactly the same to me.
No, well they don't to us.
What's wrong with that one?
Well, we can see the wafer, so that's wafer reveal.
Apart from wafer reveal... We have bubbles on the chocolate.
Also, the chocolate is not as shiny as it normally is.
Mate, you're being a little too fussy!
Look, I'm a customer, all right?
It doesn't bother me. Right.
How much of a chocolate geek have you become?
Well, if I went on Mastermind,
I reckon I could get through that quite easily.
Specialist subject - the Kit Kat. Yes.
What happens to all of the ones you're throwing away?
They all go into rework where they're used for the fillings for the wafers.
What's the wafer filling?
Well, as you can see here, we have a wafer...
Oh, in between the wafers?
Yes, that's right. I saw that put on.
Right, OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, brilliant.
Now do you understand that? Brilliant. Right, good. Brilliant.
It's incredible that we've got all this hi-tech machinery,
yet you and I are picking out defunct Kit Kats by hand.
Because machinery is not perfect either, is it?
I suppose you're right. The only time I've ever stared at anything
and seen no defect at all is the shaving mirror.
SHE LAUGHS I won't comment on that.
It is incredible how many chocolate bars are being produced here
with so few people.
As hi-tech as all this seems, they've actually been making
chocolate here for over 100 years,
but back then the factory floor would have looked
very, very different.
In the shadow of the modern factory, there's a monument
to chocolate-making past.
This is the old Rowntree's factory in York.
It was acquired by Nestle in 1987,
and there was so much rich history that they appointed a dedicated
Rowntree historian - Alex Hutchinson - to preserve
its significant past.
I've been given access to the old site
and its archives to discover just why it's so special.
In comparison to other factories at the time,
was this a good one, a bad one?
This was a good one. This was a very good one.
Everybody wanted to work for Rowntree's. Very good pensions.
If you were ill, there was a doctor. If you needed a dentist,
you could see a dentist. And they would look after you.
They would look after you very, very well indeed.
The Rowntrees were Quakers,
a religious society formed in England in the 17th century.
The highly moral Quaker grocers were trusted to produce
unadulterated chocolate.
TRAIN TOOTS
And so a handful of these Quaker families became the
top chocolate makers in Britain.
Birmingham had Cadbury's, Bristol had Fry's
and York had Rowntree's.
The Rowntree family are Quaker.
Do you think that made a difference to how they did business?
Very much so.
They wanted to treat their workers like they were family.
They didn't want to view them as cogs in a machine.
To improve their workers' lives, the Rowntree family designed
a factory that was bright and airy and chock-full of perks.
You've got your theatre, library, ballroom,
sports grounds and, of course, there's a sick pay, paid holiday.
The wage packet was quite healthy too.
What was it like in production,
inside that factory when it was at full bustle?
# Pack all your troubles in your old kitbag and smile... #
It would have been noisy, you'd have rows and rows of girls
with piping bags full of liquid chocolate,
hand-piping chocolates.
'There's no girl like a Yorkshire girl for dexterity and quickness
'in squeezing out the swirls of rich chocolate.'
And then you'd have had men coming in and out with
sack barrows, collecting boxes full of finished products
and taking them off to the railways to go all over the world.
The welfare pioneered in the chocolate factories was soon adopted
across Britain.
While the founding members of the Rowntree family may have
passed on, the community they created lasted for generations.
I want to meet the people who lived and worked here
to hear for myself what life was really like.
Bernice and Eddie Atkinson worked here for over 40 years.
They married in 1957.
So you met on the same production line?
Well, I was what they used to call a "material server,"
being straight from school,
and she worked on the conveyor packing. Packing.
We'd get talking and that's... that's how you meet.
And the first time I saw him, he was little...
I still am. ..with rosy cheeks, small.
And I said to somebody, "I'd love to take him to bed and cuddle him,"
cos he was like a teddy bear... Never dreaming I would years later.
RUTH LAUGHS I enjoyed it all.
I loved working in the factory.
Alex has uncovered some film archive with a surprise for Bernice
and Eddie, so I've arranged a special viewing in the old factory.
Oh. Oh, God.
That goes in there and that fondant comes on top, and that sets,
and then it goes to them rollers to get covered with chocolate.
Aye, it was marvellous how they did it.
They did that day in, day out, hours on end.
Right up until... Yeah. ..the 1980s.
I wouldn't have liked that.
No. Definitely not.
That's all you were doing all the time, making the cardboard
cartons for Black Magic.
Now, that would have been monotonous.
That's it. Them were the jobs you did. I know you did.
At its height, the Rowntree's factory even had
its own railway station to shift the huge numbers of products
and workers.
After moving off the production line,
Eddie became a supervisor of the Rowntree's delivery trains.
Who's that there? Who's that? I think that's me.
That's you? I think so, yeah. It is!
What, with the shunting pole? Yeah. Yeah, that's me, yeah.
That is you. Yeah. Film star.
But, by the late 1980s, consumer demand for cheaper chocolate
saw the beginning of the end for the old ways.
The more labour-intensive parts of the production lines
were replaced with mechanised systems and machines
capable of churning out chocolates by the millions.
Before retiring, Eddie and Bernice
were amongst the last to make chocolate the old way.
But the sense of welfare began by the Quakers
has left a lasting mark on the British workplace.
The way we make chocolate may well have changed,
but the legacy of those early chocolate makers lives on.
# And smile, smile, smile. #
Here at Nestle, we're 21 hours into the chocolate-making process.
And we've already got millions of chocolate bars ready to be eaten.
But before that can happen, they need packing up.
In this factory, 3.5 million of these chocolate bars
need to be individually wrapped every day.
First, it's the foil wrap.
And then the paper.
27 feet are used every second.
Then they're bundled into multipacks.
Ex-army man Scott Robinson gives the bars
one last inspection before they're packed into boxes
with military precision.
Why, with all this machinery, are we packing them by hand?
Because, er, we can actually...
We get a better quality finish.
People can see anything that's gone wrong.
Machines can go, you can have sensors,
but they won't feel or see things that are not right.
Can I have a go? Yeah. Feel free.
Come on, down you come!
Here we go now, lovely.
Like that? Fold it that way now.
Ah, quick! Push it through there.
That's it, nice and gently. Make sure it's square.
I ain't got time to do it gently. Right.
'It's not as easy as it looks.'
Oh, my gawd.
For crying out loud, we've got an avalanche happening here.
How many do you lift at a time? Five.
What, have you go got hands like a bear?
I'm just lucky. I have, yeah.
Oh, that's it(!) Just dump another load at the front, make it harder.
SCOTT LAUGHS
This is actually physically quite challenging.
It is. Do you dream about it?
Uh, not any more.
Stop 'em, they're going to roll off the end.
The box really slows you down.
So they've sold the whole principle on this on having a break,
yet me and you don't get one.
There's a bit of an irony there, don't you think so, Scott?
Yeah, you need it.
Panic's setting in here.
GREGG LAUGHS You have to come and help me, mate.
I can't get them done quick enough, look. Give it a go, then.
I've tried my best, Scott. Yeah, you've done well.
While Scott shows me how it's done, Cherry's off to meet an expert
chocolatier to find out why we're so patriotic about our chocolate.
Chocolate has been our favourite sweet treat for over 200 years.
But it's not imported chocolate we buy the most of.
The top three selling brands in the UK -
Dairy Milk, Kit Kat and Snickers - are all made right here.
So what is it about British chocolate
that we all find so irresistible?
To find out, I've come to meet master chocolatier Paul A Young.
He's won many awards for making chocolates
with a uniquely British flavour.
I feel like I'm meeting chocolate royalty.
You are definitely the most qualified person to answer this.
Why do we love British chocolate so much?
It makes us really happy. It does! It does.
It makes me so happy.
It's not just the sugar - it's the feeling, the texture,
the nostalgic reminiscence of childhood of when you first had it.
Hand anyone chocolate and they'll smile.
'These days, we have the choice of chocolate from any country
'we like, but yet we still choose British.'
What is it about foreign chocolate that just doesn't sit right with us?
We are tuned to love British chocolate from being very young,
but there are chocolates from all around the world.
America, Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, France, you name it,
and it's all specifically different
and tailored to the palate of the country.
So it seems we all hanker after the chocolate we ate as children.
But can we really taste the difference
between British and foreign brands?
Paul and I are going to put the Great British public to the test.
We're going to take four different chocolates
from four different countries and see which one people prefer.
But first, we need to melt down the chocolates and reset them
in the same shape to make sure they all look the same.
So they all look the same
and no-one will be able to tell which one is which.
They won't... Mwa-ha-ha. ..it's a secret.
Milk chocolate is made up of cocoa, sugar and milk,
but the proportions can vary according to its country of origin.
We've got four varieties of milk chocolate.
So we've got Belgian, American, British and Swiss.
The Swiss is very, very milky, incredibly smooth, light colour.
I think most people would say, "That's a nice milky chocolate."
Hmm.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is the American.
Eurgh! I mean, it is...
This is probably the biggest-selling American chocolate.
So, what is it that gives it that - to be polite -
distinctive flavour and taste?
It's the milk crumb, and they've manipulated it
to create butyric acid.
That gives it the cheesy, sour, really off smell and taste to us.
And did you know that butyric acid is a component of vomit?
Oh, that's not OK!
It's not OK for me.
Do you think most people would be able to tell
the difference between these four types of chocolate?
I think they will, and I think the British chocolate
will be the most popular.
But will Paul be right?
With all the chocolates cleverly disguised, we're taking to the
streets to see if people really do prefer British chocolate.
Hi, is there any way that we could tempt you to try some chocolate?
Yeah?
We're doing a taste test.
Yeah, shall we? Yes! Do you want to try some before your main course?
First, they try the American version.
Erm... No? You don't like that?
There's an aftertaste. There is. What is the aftertaste?
Oh, wow, like off milk.
And it seems that American chocolate isn't a hit with British
taste buds anywhere we go.
I'm not particularly impressed with that.
It's got this really bitter taste to it.
It's actually a bit sicky.
It's too... It's not nice.
'In fact, out of the four - American, British, Belgian and Swiss -
'it was the British chocolate that came out the winner.'
It's just a different texture. It's creamier.
That's a bit more, like... More, like...
A bit more Dairy Milk chocolate kind of taste.
Mmm, it's nice.
'From garages...
'..to hairdressers.'
Creamier than the first and second one.
Really smooth, really rich.
That's very creamy, I think. Hmm.
We have a winner on our hands. Yes! Really?
That is the British chocolate. Well done.
So, obviously, people still love British chocolate,
but no-one's picked American.
No-one's picked American.
We did find some people who like American chocolate...
Americans.
MUSIC: US National Anthem
Oh.
I'm going to have to change all of my answers.
That's definitely American.
That's my favourite.
It's just sort of, like, bringing home to you
versus you having to go home.
It doesn't taste fake to me,
and that's why I think it's pretty great.
Whether we want a bar to treat ourselves, or as a comfort,
we know what we like and we like the familiar,
but it's those childhood memories that keep us Brits so loyal
to the chocolate that we love.
22 hours after the beans first came on site,
the wrapped chocolate bars are now ready for customers.
A team of 30-foot-high robots now stack them onto pallets.
And conveyor belts take them to a warehouse to await distribution.
But, with four million chocolate bars to deal with every day,
this is no ordinary warehouse.
Distribution manager Sally Wright has let me inside.
Oh, my word!
Crying out loud.
I didn't realise this much chocolate actually existed in the world.
Good grief.
GREGG LAUGHS
What do you call this place? This is the building.
"The building?" The building.
Occupying the land space of two football pitches
and towering eight storeys high,
every single pallet of chocolate is stored, monitored
and moved by robots.
Once the stock's been fed into "the building"
by the conveyor belts,
the humans no longer have any control over what happens to it.
We don't have human's controlling it.
We don't have fork truck drivers in here.
The building knows where all the empty spaces are,
where all the stock is.
When we have orders, it knows where to go and get the stock.
When we have fresh stock coming in, it knows where to put it away.
It self controls.
The building runs itself? Pretty much so, yeah.
We watch over it with a computer system,
but ultimately, it self manages.
From the moment the chocolate comes into the building,
the five giant unmanned cranes stack the pallets, store them,
and then send them to the loading area when the orders come in.
Do humans get in those?
The engineers do, yeah.
Could I have a ride on one of them? Yes, we can arrange that.
Whoa!
Wahey-hey-hey!
HE LAUGHS Wahey!
Whoooa!
Whoa! Ha-ha!
Will it stop before the wall at the end?
It may do. GREGG LAUGHS
MUSIC: Song 2 by Blur
This is nuts!
All that to give us a chocolate bar?
Yeah.
It's a strange world.
Wahey-hey-hey!
GREGG LAUGHS
It takes the building just one week to get through
its entire stock of chocolate.
Every day, up to 60 trucks are loaded
from the dispatch hall at this site...
..and leave York with chocolate destined for shops and supermarkets
all over the UK and Ireland.
So next time you open a bar of chocolate, just think,
it is one very small part of an enormous, global chocolate empire.
Wow.
'Next time, I'll be taking you inside one of the largest
'fresh milk processing plants on earth.'
I've never seen anything like this, ever.
'I'll meet the people and the robots...'
Come on, come on.
HE LAUGHS
'..who get the milk from cow to carton in as little as 24 hours.'
Mate, I love this.
I absolutely love it.
Wow.
'And Cherry will lift the lid...'
Oh, whoa! Eurgh!
Looks like scrambled eggs.
'..on how you produce cheese on an epic scale.'
Tasting cheese all day, I am happy as Larry.
'You'll never look at milk in the same way again.'