Tomorrow morning in Britain,
we will get through over 1.5 million bowls of cornflakes.
And it all starts with thousands of tonnes of corn,
shipped from around the world.
Within days, it will be on breakfast tables all over the country,
but how do you manufacture breakfast cereal on this scale?
We've been given access
to the largest cereal factory in Europe, to find out.
I'm Gregg Wallace...
Give me Crunchy Nut!
..and I'm going inside, to follow this epic production line.
That is fabulous.
I'll reveal the secrets,
to ensuring the breakfast cereals we've all grown up with...
Whoa, hot Rice Krispies!
..taste exactly right every time
and the massive operation...
The scale is unbelievable.
..that delivers cereal all over the UK every day.
If I hadn't have just seen that, I would not have believed that.
I'm Cherry Healey...
Oh, that's the dream.
..and I'll be finding out how the UK produces the perfect wheat
for our best-selling cereal.
We have one of the best climates for growing wheat...
Do we? ..in the world.
Do we?
I'll find out why a special nutrient is added to our cereal.
One in five of us are actually deficient in vitamin D.
One in five of us?
And historian Ruth Goodman
looks at what we used to eat to start the day.
Gammon... Black pudding. We've got a pig's head
It's hearty(!)
It's hearty.
In the next 24 hours,
over a million boxes of cereal will come out of this one factory.
And we're going to show you how they do it.
Welcome to Inside The Factory.
This is Kellogg's Manchester factory.
It is the single largest producer of breakfast cereal in Europe
and tonight, I'm going to watch closely,
as this handful of corn gets transformed
into one of Britain's biggest-selling breakfast cereals,
Crunchy Nut cornflakes, in less than 24 hours.
It all begins nearly 9,000 miles away in Argentina,
where the corn is grown on 390 farms,
across an area the size of the Isle of Wight.
During harvesting, the kernels are stripped from the corncob,
then once a month, up to 30,000 tonnes of them
are put on to a ship bound for the UK.
After three weeks at sea, it arrives here at the Port of Liverpool,
with enough corn to make over half a billion bowls of cornflakes.
At the harbour-side cornmill, first the kernels are cleaned,
then the outer skin is removed, along with the germ,
the bit that attaches the kernel to the cob.
That's now on its way to the factory in Manchester,
where in a matter of days,
the contents of that truck will be the cornflakes on your table.
The truck full of corn kernels takes around an hour and 20 minutes
to reach Kellogg's.
Their Manchester factory, as big as 18 football fields,
is a local landmark.
And the cornflake production line keeps moving 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
Making a million packets of cereal every single day.
Factory director Tony O'Brien is in charge.
So, this is corn coming in on that wagon.
Over a 24-hour period, we'll bring in about nine or ten deliveries
and that'll make about seven million bowls of cereal.
It's a scale I can't possibly imagine
and I've got a big breakfast bowl, let me tell you.
And if no corn came in... Yeah.
..how long would it take till Britain ran out of cornflakes?
Here we've got about 700 tonnes of corn.
I reckon we've got about two days worth of...
Is that all? ..of corn supply and then... Is that all we've got?
Then, my phone would be going very, very warm indeed.
If all goes to plan,
this precious cargo will be turned into boxes of cereal
in under 24 hours.
Getting it into the factory is the responsibility
of logistics manager Paul Davies.
And that's naturally going to lift that up.
And he's entrusting that job to me.
So, what you're going to do is you're going to pull that back.
Like that? Yeah.
Then, put that shoe into there, ready for delivery of the corn.
I've never done this. If I get this wrong,
I'm going to waste 20 tonnes of corn all over the floor.
You're not going to get it wrong.
I'm not going to let you get that wrong. Thanks.
OK.
Now what?
Take this and turn it,
to open up the slide.
That's a terrible responsibility.
That's it.
The 24-hour countdown from kernels to cornflakes begins.
That is a corn waterfall, a corn avalanche.
Tomorrow's cornflakes.
Yep. That's incredible, mate.
That is incredible.
It takes an hour to pour all those kernels into the silo store.
They're a good 30 metres away from the factory plant
but if the silo was any closer, it could be dangerous
because, although it's rare, grain dust can be highly explosive.
How on Earth does it get into there to make the bowls of cereal?
It drops from there into an elevator,
which takes it up to the top.
It then drops into the silo
and gets blown across there
into the plant. It gets blown over that bridge?
It does, yeah. No way!
I wouldn't lie to you, Gregg, I promise.
Blowing the kernels over
is the quickest and most efficient way of transporting them.
It gets madder here by the minute, Paul.
You think so? Yeah!
The magic begins in the cooking hall -
fundamentally, a massive kitchen
containing 26 supersized pressure cookers.
In charge is head chef, or corn unit manager, Dan Fox.
This is the first stage where it starts its process
in becoming a cornflake.
So, what we do here is, essentially, we cook the corn.
The corn is cooked one tonne at a time.
Wey!
When the hatch is in position...
It's like a little mini submarine.
..the press of a button...
Ready? Yeah.
..signals for the release of the corn kernels...
I can hear them. I can hear them coming.
..all the way from the storage silo, through a 250-metre long pipe.
So, you've got a tonne of corn in here.
That means, by my reckoning, we need half a swimming pool full of milk
and about 30 kilos of sugar.
An hour and five minutes after arriving off the lorry,
the corn is sealed inside and ready to steam.
The pressure will reach 20 psi,
almost twice as high as a household pressure-cooker.
We add to it barley, malt, iron, sugar, salt,
and those natural flavours help take on this characteristic colour.
We add water into that corn, it swells it out,
that makes it more valuable, which then enables it
to be in the right sort of format to be made into a cornflakes.
It's... It's... It's just unfathomable.
The pressure cookers continuously rotate
to make sure the corn cooks evenly.
Can you burn it?
You can't burn it as such
but what you could do is absolutely really ruin it
by overcooking it tremendously.
So, a bit like, say if you're cooking pasta,
you can overcook the pasta so it just becomes a slop.
And after one hour and 15 minutes at 100 degrees, it's ready.
Whoa.
That feels warm and tropical.
It's this sort of like dark, sandy sort of colour.
You see it's free-flowing and essentially it's doubled in size.
The tonne of steaming, moist, hot corn
is whisked away to start drying out.
Are you a bit of a cereal anorak?
HE LAUGHS Probably I am actually, yes. Secretly, yeah.
How many times have you turned round and started talking to people about their breakfast cereal?
To be honest with you, quite a lot. Any time I do, people's eyes do glaze over,
I'm not going to lie to you, and then my wife says, "Come on, wind it up, wind it up."
I'm probably a cornflake nerd. You're probably right, yeah.
Come here, mate. Go on.
I just realised something -
I'm cooking breakfast for 30,000 people.
But not everybody has breakfast.
Almost half of us admit to missing breakfast at least once a week
and one in ten people don't eat breakfast at all.
We've all heard the old saying -
breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
But is it true?
Does it really matter if we give it a miss?
I've come to Leeds University to meet two people
who've researched this very subject.
Professors Professor Louise Dye and Katie Adolphus.
I have to confess
I quite often miss breakfast.
To me, extra time in bed is always going to win.
Is it really that bad?
It is that bad,
so, basically, breakfast does have a short-term beneficial effect
on your cognitive performance across the morning,
so those that have eaten breakfast
do better on tests of reaction time, memory and attention
than those who have skipped breakfast.
Eating breakfast in the morning
actually prevents a decline in cognitive function.
It's not going to make me Superwoman but it's going to keep me constant.
With the help of the professors, I've set up an experiment
so that I can see the effects of ignoring breakfast for myself.
It's 7am, the sun hasn't even come up,
but we're here at this Leeds office and we're waiting for the workers
to arrive because they are going to be our guinea pigs.
Our test subjects are creatives, based at a work space hub,
and none of them have had breakfast yet.
Before we start the experiment,
Professor Dye needs a baseline reading of their cognitive function.
So, the first test is a memory test,
the second test is a reaction time test
and the third test is a sustained attention test.
First, the volunteers are shown 16 pictures,
and ten minutes later, asked to recall which ones they saw.
Next, reactions are assessed
by a black circle appearing on the left or the right of the screen.
They must respond correctly as soon as they see it.
In the attention test, they must press a button
whenever they spot three odd or three even numbers in a row.
That was really hard.
That was very hard.
And now we will...
You're in two groups,
so one group will get breakfast and the other, I'm afraid, won't.
So sorry to break this to you
but, Team A, you don't get any breakfast,
you just get a glass of water,
and, Team B, you get breakfast
and you can have as much or as little as you like.
Go for it.
But just try not to, you know, show that lot.
Now, all our volunteers need to work as normal.
An hour and a half after the experiment began
and I'm checking in with the water-only workers.
Are you a breakfast-eater?
Yes, I would have had a massive bowl of porridge about an hour ago.
And how are you feeling right now?
I'm pretty hungry. Just really distracting.
Has it affected you so far?
Well, we've mainly been looking at pictures of food on the internet.
So, yeah, we're quite distracted, I'd say.
I am a little worried about it.
I'm thinking so much about the fact that I am hungry
that I'm worried about how well I'll be able to manage the space.
Two hours in and the professors are retesting
both the control group and the fasting group.
By this time, they've already exerted quite a lot of effort,
they've been performing all morning.
They've gone back to their desks and carried on working,
so they should be tiring now
and we'd expect their performance to be declining.
So, if you're used to having breakfast every day,
missing it is likely to be detrimental.
So, when they haven't eaten breakfast,
they feel very sluggish, they feel that they can't focus, not as alert
and they also feel very frustrated and angry and quite hard done by
that they haven't eaten breakfast.
I want to see if our hungry group is finding the test any harder.
The numbers thing,
they were dancing at me by about halfway through.
The numbers bit was...
It was really hard to concentrate
and by the end I just, kind of, felt like I was in a blur of numbers.
I'm doing OK, bit of a foggy head.
Just putting numbers together properly, I'm having
to triple-check everything, cos my concentration is a bit shot.
How much do you think your productivity has been affected?
I think massively so.
Yeah, I've done maybe a third of what I normally do.
Three and a half hours after we started and after the final test,
how did our officer workers compare?
The breakfast-eaters sailed through all the tasks.
The workers without food did OK on the memory test,
but they were 4% slower on reaction times
and a whole 6% behind on the attention test.
It looks like the experiment has worked.
People who didn't have breakfast really did struggle
with their performance. Absolutely.
From the studies in our lab, the task that measures attention,
performance is normally 7% lower in the breakfast-skippers
compared to those who have eaten breakfast.
It's quite a big percentage.
So, it doesn't matter if you're a toast, a porridge
or a scrambled-egg person, think twice before skipping breakfast.
I know that I will.
Back at the cereal factory and our corn kernels are in the drying room,
three hours after they arrived here.
They've soaked up moisture during cooking,
so now they're moving slowly on a looped conveyor belt
through this nearly 100-foot long, extremely noisy double-decker dryer.
Is this the biggest bit of kit in the factory?
It's probably the single biggest stand-alone piece of equipment.
That's all dryer? Yeah, so, it starts there,
all the way along,
down,
all the way back again. There's probably in the region of
several thousand bowls just gone past your shoulder now.
You won't ever get closer to this amount of cornflakes ever.
Absolutely. I'm sure if the Guinness Book Of Records was here and
we had a bowl big enough, it would be the biggest bowl of cornflakes.
It takes two and a half hours of hot-air fanning over the corn
before it's ready.
What are you looking for?
That was the corn coming out of your cooker.
You can see it's got that, sort of, golden colour
and it's quite soft.
But not wet, just squishy. And as it goes through the drying process,
what we're looking for at the end is this sort of texture,
so it should be dryer, darker.
That should be slightly harder.
Yeah, slight bounce on it. It's got a little bit of give.
Yeah, and, actually, that's absolutely critical.
If we dry it too fast or too hard,
we're in danger of crushing it into a powder.
If one stage breaks down, what happens?
Everything before it stops.
So, is not just this section that stops,
it's all the 26 tonnes of cookers beforehand that stops.
That could cost millions.
That's correct, yes.
I can't believe they've given all that responsibility
to somebody like you, Dan.
Sometimes I can't believe it myself, Gregg, if I'm honest.
The next stop is the milling room, where our corn kernels,
still moist in the middle,
are about to be transformed into a much more familiar shape.
They're rolled through that mill.
What do you mean rolled? Squashed?
Imagine a mangle,
they shear it, to sort of flatten it and elongate it.
Mate, they squash it. Yeah.
The kernels are fed between two giant steel rollers...
..which turn in opposite directions,
one slightly faster than the other.
That means the kernels don't get crushed, but stretched,
all in a second or less.
Going through here, the equivalent of 200 bowls a minute.
They now look like cornflakes to me.
They might look like cornflakes, but they're not cornflakes yet.
Give it a feel. Feel it.
You're all right. Feel it. No, it's wet.
No, it's... Scrunch it.
You can make it into a ball.
Yeah, that's not right. No.
It's all stretchy and rubbery. Yeah.
What have you done to my cornflakes?! So...
Would you like that in your breakfast bowl in the morning?
No.
I'm about to discover how Dan turns my squidgy wet flakes
into the classic crunch we're all familiar with.
But around 150 years ago,
I wouldn't have had any kind of cornflakes in my breakfast bowl,
because cereal hadn't been invented.
Now, Ruth Goodman is finding out
what the Victorians were eating instead.
Breakfast before cereal was a gut-busting business.
Wow, this is quite spread here.
Isn't it just?
I'm sitting down to a 19th-century feast
with historian Seren Evans-Charrington.
So, what exactly have we got here?
We'll start off with a nice little bit of boiled lobster,
some langoustines.
We've got faggots, meat pies, bacon,
cold cuts of meat.
Gammon. Gammon, black pudding,
we've got a pig's head filled with jellied brawn.
It's hearty(!)
It's hearty.
So, your breakfast would change
depending on what you'd had the night before, what was left over.
One thing I'm really noticing is the enormous amount of protein...
Mmm. ..that's on the table... Yes.
..and the complete lack of fruit.
Yes. But this is really high-class dining.
You had a really hearty breakfast that was going to set you up
for the day and keep you going until you ate again.
We're not thinking about our waistline.
We're not thinking about the nutritional value of it
and it's thought that this is good for you, at this point.
Even the average Victorian was gorging down
a mind-boggling 4,500 calories a day,
almost twice the amount we eat now.
In a modern life, if you sat down to this every day,
well, you'd give yourself a whole range of health problems. Yeah.
They are getting lots of gout, you've got problems with obesity,
all sorts of gastrointestinal problems.
Put simply, this breakfast made people fat and flatulent.
Things had to change.
So, in 1863, an American doctor, James Caleb Jackson,
came up with an alternative for his patients,
a healthy vegetarian breakfast, that he called Granula.
And we're going to try and recreate it.
So, what we're looking for is stiff wallpaper paste consistency.
'We're mixing wheat flour and water, to make a dough.'
We want to bake it until it's the consistency of a hard brick.
'That's nine hours in a low temperature oven,
'then cooled and put back in for another nine hours.'
This has been twice baked. This is quite hard, isn't it? It's tough.
Break it up into these little pieces. Something like that?
Yeah. But it's hard going, flaking it.
'The flakes now need to be ground.'
Now, that's starting to look much more like a cereal.
But before you want to eat it, you've got to soak it overnight.
'After about 30 hours of preparation,
'a very plain breakfast is served.'
Brace yourself.
It's not horrible. It's not exciting. Worthy, I think...
That is what it's meant to be. I can't say it's a food for pleasure.
It tastes like a health food.
There's no sugariness, there's no saltiness. It's just very simple.
Pleasant or not, Jackson had invented the first
commercially-available breakfast cereal.
It wasn't profitable, but it led to other health specialists
developing their own varieties.
This is where the Kellogg's story starts.
In 1894, Dr John Kellogg,
chief medical officer of a sanatorium, and his brother,
William Keith, were trying to make granola for patients,
using corn, oatmeal and wheat.
One-day, William Keith was experimenting with wheat grains
and over-softened a batch by mistake.
Instead of destroying them, he tried rolling and baking the mushy grains.
And by accident, created the wheat flake of today.
And from there, it was but a short step to creating
the very first...cornflakes.
Back at Kellogg's factory, cornflakes might still be their
most iconic product, but it's not their only one.
Here they also make chocolate, frosted and raisin wheats -
Frosties and Ricicles.
And I want to see what else is cooking.
Technician Paul Richardson is the man who puts the snap,
crackle and pop into one of their childhood classics.
I feel a bit silly, but I never realised that Rice Krispies
actually were made from rice.
Well, the clue's in the title, isn't it? What rice is it? Arborio.
I've got that, that's Italian risotto rice. I've got that at home.
After cooking and flavouring, the rice is dried, trimmed
and put aside.
And then, it has to be puffed up by hot air.
On our oven here, we have 1,000 tubes.
That puffs it up, so you've got your snap, your crackle and your pop.
So, from there to there, in about 20 feet of tubes,
hot air and colour, I'm going to get rice to Rice Krispie?
That's right. Oh-ho!
As you can see, it's hot! Whoa! Hot Rice Krispies!
If I hadn't had just seen that, I would not have believed that.
HE LAUGHS
After, Rice Krispies get extra special treatment.
They're covered in a mixture of cocoa, water and sugar -
on their way to becoming Coco Pops.
That is a thing of beauty.
Vicky Stanton is in charge of the only Coco Pop machine
in the country.
Do you know how many bowls you're producing? 2.5 million a day.
From this one machine? So this is running constantly? Yeah.
I feel like I should pay homage to it.
SHE LAUGHS
The hot chocolaty syrup turns the rice grains moist and sticky,
so now, they need drying out -
very slowly.
So, I can feel the cool air.
That's drying it and taking the heat away.
Most of them are loose, but I can still see some clusters. Wey!
What happens to them? They fall down on to what we call
the cluster buster.
So it falls off the edge and breaks up the lumps? Yes. Brilliant.
Brilliant.
You can leave them there, if you want.
SHE LAUGHS
Of course, the cocoa and the two and a half teaspoons of sugar
in an average bowlful is what makes Coco Pops so moreish.
But they're not the only extra ingredients.
Every Kellogg's cereal is fortified with minerals and vitamins,
most recently, in some varieties, vitamin D.
Cherry is finding out why we need it added to our breakfast.
Vitamin D is essential to absorb calcium for healthy teeth and bones.
But new research suggests that there are other important benefits.
I've come to St Bart's and London Centre for Immunobiology to meet
Professor Adrian Martineau.
For the last ten years we've been working on the effects
of vitamin D on the immune system.
In particular, on resistance to the common cold.
So what did you discover?
We've done clinical trials and the results have shown in people
who have low vitamin D levels to start with, giving them
extra vitamin D supplements can reduce the risk of getting
a cold by around 50%. That's absolutely huge.
So if you have low vitamin D levels, topping them up can potentially
prevent you from getting the common cold by up to 50%. Exactly right.
It's not just colds you risk if you are low in vitamin D.
Serious conditions, from type I diabetes to some cancers,
as well as children developing bone-softening rickets,
have been linked to severe vitamin D deficiency.
One way we can get this super nutrient is sunshine.
We can produce it by our skin converting ultraviolet light.
So if we spend plenty of time outdoors,
then surely we'll get enough of it.
Not in the short days of winter,
according to nutritionist Angelique Panagos.
So the sun actually has to be at a certain angle,
so it has to be at about 50 degrees above the horizon.
And in that way, the UVB rays can actually penetrate
through the atmosphere and help us to synthesise vitamin D.
But in the UK, the sun in winter is always very low.
The sun, unfortunately, is letting us down.
So, from about October through to April,
we can't synthesise vitamin D.
So, if you live in the UK and you go out into the sunshine
in winter, you're not really getting a vitamin D benefit.
You're not getting a vitamin D benefit.
Although we store the vitamin D we make in the summer,
it can be depleted over the winter.
Research has shown that one in five of us are actually deficient
in vitamin D. One in five of us?! One in five.
That's enough to make me want to get my own levels checked,
so I'm using a self-testing kit.
If ten million people are vitamin D deficient,
then there's quite a good chance that I am, too.
But there's only one way to find out.
Two weeks later, my results are back.
Now, it's time to find out if I'm one of the 20% of the population
that is deficient in this sunshine vitamin.
Adequate! That's not good! Adequate. Good excuse to go on more holidays.
OK!
So, my vitamin D levels at the moment are OK,
but what happens if they dip? What can I eat to keep them topped up?
So, you can get some vitamin D from food sources.
So, oily fish is a good one.
You'd need to be eating a lot of one food to be getting that
vitamin D kick that we're looking for.
To get my ten microgram daily dose,
I would need to eat either one fresh salmon fillet or six eggs
or eight home-made beefburgers,
52 bacon rashers or 333 fried mushrooms.
Taking a vitamin D supplement would be easier
and having a boost at breakfast could also help.
The sunshine vitamin is put into a range of cereals voluntarily
by Kellogg's, and most other cereal manufacturers,
providing around a tenth of the recommended daily allowance.
At the mega cereal factory,
our corn kernels have reached the toasting area.
It's five hours and 36 minutes since they entered the factory
and they're halfway to becoming a bowl of proper cornflakes.
Wow!
Now, those soggy, flattened flakes need crisping up.
In here, we dry it, we toast it.
That's a circular rotating toaster? In simple terms, yes.
It's taking the moist flake and making it crispy. Yes.
And as it rotates around there,
the rotation action separates those flakes out.
So, my big, gooey flake becomes separate, light crispy ones?
Absolutely, yeah.
It's in there for about seven to ten seconds. Is that all? Yeah.
That is the fastest cereal I've ever seen. Yes.
Incredibly, these cornflakes are coming through at
a rate of ten bowls a second. Help yourself, tuck in. They're hot.
They're hot. It's like a plate of hot chips.
Mate, have you ever thought about selling hot cornflakes?
It's a treat not many people get to experience.
You won't get a fresher cornflake than that.
The cornflakes are good to go.
Great big river of cornflakes.
That's right, they're cornflakes, but equally,
we will turn them into Crunchy Nut cornflakes or Frosties. Really?
Really, yeah. So right now, that could be any one of three?
Any one of three, yeah.
Five hours 36 minutes and 15 seconds in,
and the plain cornflakes head off for packing,
while Frosties is diverted away for extra flavouring,
along with Crunchy Nut, which was invented right here at the factory.
I'd love to make Crunchy Nut.
How do you stop them going up to cornflakes? I make a phone call.
Can I make that phone call? One second. No way!
Is that Steve?
Steve, can we divert some to Crunchy Nut? Give me Crunchy Nut!
Go, Crunchy Nut! Do it, Steve.
Yay!
Cornflakes go that way, Crunchy Nut down that way.
Am I going there next? You'll be going there very shortly, yeah.
I'm becoming very fond of you. Well, the feeling's mutual.
Cornflakes have been the same shape and size as they were
when they were first invented over 100 years ago.
But what if you prefer your breakfast cereal
more biscuit shaped?
Cherry's been to find out how Weetabix is made.
This is the most popular cereal in the UK.
We eat over ten million of these every morning.
Producing that many biscuits takes a massive amount of wheat.
It used to come from all over the UK, and sometimes abroad,
but six years ago, this cereal factory in Northamptonshire made
a big decision to grow every single grain within a 50 mile radius.
Closer contact with the wheat farms means
a more consistent crop and less damage to the environment.
I've come to visit one of their 160 farmers.
Wow!
Oh, that's amazing.
Robert Barnes supplies enough wheat for about 150 million
wheat biscuits.
This is a monster mountain of wheat.
In this barn, we've got 2,500 tonnes
of wheat destined for Weetabix.
That's absolutely staggering.
We have one of the best climates for growing wheat in the world. Do we?
So you're telling me that England is a great climate to grow wheat?
When the temperature gets too hot, the wheat plant will shut down
and the yield will be suppressed.
In southern Europe, they won't get the yield we'll get.
Because the temperatures are too high. Because they're too high.
So delicate. It's a little princess, isn't it?
The wheat is harvested in the height of summer and stored for up
to ten months.
It has to be kept cool to prevent pest infestation,
so its temperature needs constant monitoring.
We have remote sensors in the grain that have little radio
transmitters on and it'll say, "I'm too warm here, I need the fans on."
So it'll start my fans to cool,
and that fan will draw the air down through the grain and up
through the column to cool the grain down to five degrees.
I had no idea it was so hi-tech.
Every year, Robert fills 100 trucks with wheat to keep up with
demand from the factory.
That's a 29 tonne truckload of wheat.
That might sound like a lot, but up the road is the world's largest
Weetabix factory, and they go through ten truckloads every single day.
At the factory, it's cleaned and softened in water before
being pressure cooked with salt, sugar, vitamins and malt.
That's amazing. Oh, wow.
Showing me the just cooked wheat is factory manager Gordon Riddick.
So you can feel it's quite sticky, it's quite moist, quite soft.
Quite pliable. And smells fantastic. That is... Oh, that's the dream.
Malty cooked wheat.
The wheat is then pressed into flakes by one of
the 48 rolling mills in this huge milling room.
This is what we call the cathedral. It's such a large building.
It's magnificent. Absolutely.
That is so nearly Weetabix.
That's an individual grain been squashed. Squashed. Squashed.
They cram around 365 wheat grains into every biscuit.
If you want to take a whole handful, squeeze it tight in your hands.
It's just the moisture content and the compression that form the biscuit.
It's a Weetabix! It's a Weetabix. Pressure... And moisture.
And moisture. Yes, appliance of physics. That's all it is.
It looks a little bit like a squashed tennis ball,
but it's all right.
All the grain flakes are carried along to the biscuit machine,
where they tumble into moulds.
This is fabulous, I can absolutely see
now how the Weetabix are being formed.
Once the biscuits are shaped, they're twice baked.
How long is this oven? This oven is 150 foot long.
Almost comical.
Here we make 250,000 biscuits every single hour.
That equates to 13 million biscuits for the whole site. A day? A day.
End to end, they would stretch from here to Aberdeen and back again.
And 45 minutes after the wheat grains went into the pressure
cooker, they've become Britain's top-selling cereal.
Oooh!
This is the end of the process, this is us ready to pack the biscuits.
Where do they go? They go all over the UK, all over Europe.
Every grain of wheat has been grown locally, so whether this ends
up on a breakfast table in Brighton or Berlin,
it's all thanks to the farmers around this factory here in Northamptonshire.
It's five hours 39 minutes since the raw corn kernels were delivered.
And back at the factory, I'm now in the coating room,
where my ordinary cornflakes are about to be Crunchy Nutted.
So these peanuts are the nuts on the Crunchy Nut?
Yes. They come from the Americas.
We take them as whole peanuts, then we slice them through and you get that.
How do you stick the nuts to the cornflake?
We use honey, from the Americas again. Molasses sugar and vitamins.
There's, like, a syrup to form a gloop. Why don't you use British honey?
We haven't got anything against British honey.
We need consistent stuff, like, 365 days a year.
Good? Of course it's good. It's a cornflake, nuts and honey. Yeah.
Every 24 hours, the factory mixes together ten tonnes of nut,
three tonnes of honey and two tonnes of molasses, a sweet syrup.
On a bigger scale.
In this room here is your base cornflake. Then you're adding
your honey, your molasses sugar, your vitamin profile and your nuts, all in there.
They're spinning around, they've been coated in that drum.
The sweet molasses and honey glue plus sugar mean there's just over
two and a half teaspoons of sugar in your average bowl of Crunchy Nut.
It's the equivalent of just over 3,000 bowls a minute. No way. Yeah.
No way. Yeah.
As they fall out, they're evenly coated onto this bed here.
That is a sugary rake.
My grandmother used to make me go out in autumn and do that with
a ton of leaves.
Obviously it's got to dry out now a little bit. That's right.
At the minute, you can see it's shiny and it's hot.
What happens now, it goes through the drying process
and then it becomes the standard, dry Crunchy Nut cornflakes that you're used to.
Most of the breakfast cereal we buy is sold ready to eat,
you just add milk and "boof", it's ready.
But there are signs of a breakfast revolution.
The market for cold cereals has barely changed over the past
five years, while porridge sales have zoomed up nearly 60%.
Cherry is investigating its appeal.
There are three bestselling types of oats.
Traditional Scottish oatmeal,
which is simply roughly ground oat kernels.
Jumbo rolled oat meal is whole kernels steamed and flattened.
And pre-cooked and finely ground instant porridge,
which is the big hitter, winning over half of all hot cereal sales.
But does it taste as good,
and do you as much good as traditional or jumbo rolled porridge?
Scoffing more porridge than anyone else are 25- to 34-year-olds,
so we're going to test all three types on early morning city commuters.
It's just turned 6am,
but already there is a stream of people going to work.
Today, we're going to ask the hungry office workers to try three
different porridges and tell us which one is their favourite.
It's a porridge showdown and there can be only one winner.
We're cooking up all three types.
In the Scottish oat corner is home-grown chef Gizzi Erskine.
Backing the jumbo rolled oat is Neil Hargett.
A childhood porridge enthusiastic, he's recently rediscovered
its joys and now eats it religiously.
And then there's me, armed with instant porridge, which is great
because my porridge-making skills are a bit rubbish.
Welcome to the porridge showdown. I'm very excited to have you here.
So, the rules of the day are,
you have to use the ingredients provided to you.
You have porridge, milk, water, salt.
You can use them in any proportion you like.
No fancy toppings, just salt, no sugar. Just salt?
Yes, and I'm watching you. Are you ready? Ready? Ready.
Right, let's do this.
Chef Gizzi starts her Scottish oats cooking in water.
Her 30 minute recipe uses equal parts milk to oats.
Why do you cook it so slowly and for such a long time?
The slower you cook, the sort of more evenly it's going to cook.
A lot of people don't cook their oats properly, there's too much bite to them.
I'm going to put some salt in there as well.
Porridge oats contain a soluble fibre called beta-glucan,
which lowers cholesterol and can help control blood sugar levels.
It can even reduce the risk of heart disease.
'Neil has more reason than most for championing this healthy breakfast.'
How often do you have porridge?
I have porridge virtually every day. Really?!
Virtually every day. Why is that?
I had a heart attack
and I went off the fried breakfasts and everything else
and back to basics.
So the porridge has really helped your health? Yeah.
Neil is using twice the quantity of milk to his jumbo rolled oats.
You put the oats in a pan, you put the milk in the pan,
you serve it while it's getting warm.
And his porridge needs 10 minutes.
Gizzi and Neil have nearly finished their porridge.
I'd better crack on with mine. The instructions say...
add milk, cook for two minutes.
I think even I can't get that wrong.
'All three porridges are nearly cooked and there's
'already quite a difference.'
'Gizzi seems the creamiest, Neil's definitely has more texture
'and mine... Well, I'm starting to feel a little less confident.'
Mine's very beigy brown and yours is a kind of creamy white. Yeah...
Also mine smells like... Mine smells like biscuits.
'Unsweetened instant oats do have the same health value as the others
'but, according to the latest research
'from the British Journal of Nutrition,
'Scottish or rolled oats metabolise slower
'and keep you feeling fuller for longer.'
OK, so we've got our three porridges.
Are you confident? Dead confident. Yes?
I'm pretty confident. Yeah? Let's see which ones are best. Right. OK.
Here are three porridges.
Please could you taste them and tell us which one you like the most?
This one's already... It's not as thick. Tastes more milky.
Yeah, it's more like rice pudding. So which one is your favourite?
I'm going to go for the middle one, the creamy, ricey one.
So am I. Same here, yeah.
Do you like porridge?
I love porridge. Do you?! OK, that's good.
Mmm. I can just tell from the noises that you've made
which one you like the most.
I think this one is my favourite.
So do you eat porridge? Yes.
So which one is your favourite?
I think for me it's probably the middle one.
It's thick, it's porridgy.
I like this the most.
I think that one.
I think I like this one.
That's all right. Yes! You've nailed it!
'Although we only tested a small sample,
'we've had some strong opinions
'about the different types of porridge.'
So the results are in.
I came last with four.
Neil, you were next with seven. Ahh.
And, Gizzi, you blew us out the water with 11!
So there you have it, Gizzi's traditional slow-cooked porridge
won hands down.
So if you want a really rich and creamy porridge in the morning,
you may have to get up just a little bit earlier.
My Crunchy Nut Cornflakes have reached the packing area
of the factory just over six hours
since they came here as corn kernels.
First stop is the weighing room.
Every click you hear is a bag of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes being
weighed out to form a perfect 500g packet.
It's like it chorus of metal frogs.
It gives you a really clear indication of how fast
you're making them. Yeah.
It's not as simple as each hopper separately weighing out
500g of cornflakes.
Each of these metal pans contains a weight somewhere between
100, maybe up to 200g of food.
So, for example, that pan might have 100g in it,
that might have 200g in it,
that might have 203, and that one might have sort of 98.
What the computer programme does,
it says there's eight tonnes there all with various different weights.
It selects the best combination of those weights in those pans
to give you the 500g.
That is a stupid system! That's just confuses everything.
Why don't you just weigh out a box worth in one hopper?
Because every cornflake, or Crunchy Nut Cornflake, is slightly different.
So to get an exact weight on the product is very, very difficult.
Each precise combination of cornflakes drops directly
into a bag, which is heat-sealed bottom and top.
To prevent any defective bags getting through,
they go past a sensor that measures them exactly.
This little blue box here is a bit like a laser beam.
That laser beam detected the correct length of that bag.
So if the bag's burst, if you deviate from set length,
that would be rejected.
You're a good teacher, you know that? Thank you very much!
Over in the packaging department,
cardboard is being turned from flat pack into boxes
in one slick move.
The machine even opens each box as it goes.
That's genius!
Six hours and three minutes ago,
each one of these Crunchy Nut Cornflakes
was a plain little kernel of corn.
Now, to make sure they're all as perfect as they should be,
Jim Carney in quality control carries out a random check
every two hours.
How long have you been doing this, Jim? A long time - 42 years.
42 years! So what year did you start? 1973.
If you do find a problem, does that mean you have to stop
the whole batch? It depends on the defect.
If it's a minor, then we can make an adjustment accordingly.
If it's a possible hold, then we stop the line
and we tell relevant supervision.
So how many boxes of cereal are we likely to throw away?
Probably about 10,000. Wow! That can't happen very often.
Hopefully not, but it does happen. It does happen. Yes.
There's a detailed checklist but Jimmy is so experienced,
'he knows in an instant if there's a problem.'
Smell the inside of the box... You do what?!
You smell the inside of the box.
What can you smell from the inside of a box, Jim?!
Well, it's hard to describe - it's through experience,
but sometimes the cardboard itself can actually taste...
Or smell off and then we have to report it.
You know like a wine buff has a perfect nose?
Can you honestly stick your nose over a box
and tell me if it's wrong or not? Yes. Really? Yes.
You do realise you're telling me you can tell the difference
between fresh and stale cardboard? Yes. Jimmy, I love you.
Give me a high five. That is just remarkable!
So, OK, once we've done the box, then what are we looking for?
Right, make sure there's a good seal.
That seems fine.
You pour the contents into this bowl here and feel it.
And feel it against this?
Yes, your standard batch of Crunchy Nut.
That's your template, if you like? Yes.
We're looking for similarity.
Lighter or darker, or too much coating
or not enough coating and then I have a taste.
Can I? Yeah, by all means.
The peanuts, the syrup, the honey...
And then we go to the reference and try that one.
Actually, that really does smell heavily of peanut,
which I've never even considered before.
To me, it's fine. Jim, I believe you.
You have got an expert nose when it comes to breakfast cereal.
Thank you.
The humble cereal has come a long way in the last 100 years.
But the most important development came in the 1950s when admen
realised that the secret weapon in selling a box of cereal
wasn't the cereal, it was the box itself.
We in Britain eat more breakfast cereal
than any other nation in Europe.
In fact, 87% of British adults sit down to a bowl every day.
Back in the first half of the 20th century,
eating cereal had already become well-established.
But it was in 1950s that sealed the deal
for our love affair with cereal.
They're Grrreat!
'I want to find out what triggered the start
'of cereal domination after the war from advertising guru Robin Wight.'
Rationing disappeared, the sugar-coated product arrived
and kids gobbled them up.
And then, at the same time almost, television arrived
with television advertising promoting these new products.
The other game-changer for cereal companies was
a crucial shift in family dynamics.
The power for or what I called the "tyrant child" emerge.
There was a shift to recognise the power of children.
They were the big consumers.
Advertisers responded by inventing pester power.
Dood-L-Oon, you get me free.
And me.
Not only were we showing the brand to a child very early on,
we were then using, what is now called, loyalty marketing,
so that irrespective of the taste,
they'd like to have the toy, they'd like to play games
on the side of the pack.
All of these things are unfolding in Britain and British kids,
and I was one of them, really loved it.
It was fun, it was great.
Of course, while we were enjoying it,
these brands were embedded in our brains.
So even now, all those years later, what's my favourite cereal?
It's Weetabix.
Cereal is the only food on the menu at one London cafe,
owned by Gary and Alan Keery.
So I went to find out why it's still so appealing to adults.
I don't think I've ever seen so many cereals all in one place!
It's quite astounding, isn't it?
I mean, what is so special about cereal?
Well, for us it was when we were kids,
it was the first thing we fell in love with.
We remember going to the supermarket and given that choice once
a week to buy a cereal that you had to eat for the rest of the week,
and it was the biggest responsibility you had.
So do you think that cereals are really just a childhood thing?
I think everything is all about nostalgia these days.
People like to feel a kid again, even though they're not.
We always used to, in the mornings, turn over the cereal box
and you used to do all the little puzzles on the back. Oh, yeah!
We had to pour out the whole cereal and get the toy.
And nostalgia certainly seems to pay.
The six top sellers in the UK today were all invented more
than 30 years ago.
Some ad campaigns have barely changed since the successes
of the 1950s and they're still as effective now
as they were back then.
I loved Coco Pops.
Snap, Crackle and Pop.
BOTH: Snap, Crackle and Pop!
The cereal industry has never stopped growing,
and in the UK it's now worth around £1.57 billion.
At the factory, the final stage of our Crunchy Nut production line
is the distribution area.
Nearly six and a half hours since the start of their journey here,
my cornflakes are boxed up
and travelling just under 3km from packing
and over the sky bridge to the warehouse.
Now, urgent orders for UK supermarkets
are dispatched straightaway,
while cereal destined for Europe and the Middle East
is stored, awaiting shipping.
The warehouse supervisor is Jeff Bolton.
How many boxes are you holding in here? Do you know?
About a quarter of one million. About 10% of what we produce.
So the ones that go to our UK shops, they don't sit around.
No... Straight onto trucks. They're straight out the door.
The scale is unbelievable!
'Every box of Crunchy Nut cartons has been given a barcode
'so it can be scanned into the system before getting some
'top to toe plastic protection.'
Hey-hey! This is a wrapping machine.
All those Crunchy Nut cartons are going to get wrapped for stabilisation.
We all need one of those for our suitcase when we go on holiday!
It's going to come forward, get labelled. Yeah, you. I'm not...
You're not going to get labelled, but I'd watch your back
because there's a vehicle coming. What's happening?!
I don't feel safe any more! What's happening? There's going to be a vehicle coming to collect this.
22 sophisticated robot shuttles do all the lifting.
Eight white ones collect the boxes and take them to the loading bay,
or hand them to the 14 red ones,
which shelve them ready for dispatch.
I mean, how do they work?
Top of the vehicle we've got a laser spinning round,
we've got a computer inside the truck,
we've got a computer in the control room
and that's where it's getting its position from.
They are always finding their position. It also knows where to take it.
It knows where it's going to, where it's picking, what it's doing.
All automated and programmed by boffins.
Do the white ones handover to the red ones?
At the end of the conveyer... No! ..the red ones will pick them up.
And the red ones look after the warehouses?
The red ones look after the warehouse and the storage.
Do they have a game of cricket?
No, they won't mix. They won't mix. They won't mix.
Do you know what? I used to see sci-fi films about this
when I was a little kid. So did I.
The computer is capable of simultaneously tracking
all 25,000 cartons heading for Europe and beyond.
How many humans are there here?
I have three operators and one craftsman looking after the
whole process in here. Four people and a team of robots?
Four people, team of robots. That is unbelievable.
That is remarkable. A million boxes of cereal a day.
Wow! Wow!
For the past six hours and 40 minutes, I've followed
corn kernels through a hugely ambitious mega machine process.
They've been cooked, squashed and stretched,
toasted and covered in honey and nuts.
That's it, that's the last pallet.
Let's get this truck loaded.
Those Crunchy Nut Cornflakes could be delivered to supermarkets
within 24 hours of being raw corn.
Yorkshire and Humberside are the biggest cereal eaters
in Britain, but they'll also be sent to Europe and all over the
world, as far away as Asia.
The scale of this production is very impressive,
but what really amazes me is the length these people go to.
They are taking natural products - it's corn,
honey and nuts and they bend them and they shape them and condition
them until they give us the exact same cereal every single time,
bowl after bowl after bowl, millions of times.
That is impressive.
'Next time...'
Bring her in.
'..we'll take you inside the largest crisp factory in the world...'
That's a packet of crisps?
'..as they make 5 million bags of crisps in 24 hours.'
How did he do it that fast?
'We'll reveal the secrets to keeping crisps fresh...'
Every bag of crisps is a bag of nitrogen
'..and Cherry's on a production line that makes 12 million
'monster feet a day.'
It's really mesmerising to watch.
That is the most crisps I've ever seen in one place!