Every year we eat a mind-boggling 90 billion sweets!
That makes us one of the biggest consumers of sweets in the world.
This is one of the oldest sweet factories in Britain.
Where a team of over 500 people is working really hard
to keep up with that demand.
And tonight, they're letting us inside.
'I'm Gregg Wallace.'
What is that?!
'And tonight I'm going to help this factory turn raw sugar...'
I've made a witch's brew here!
'..into some of Britain's most iconic sweets, from Love Hearts
'to Drumstick lollies.'
How do you get it so the pink is in the middle
and the white is around the edge?
'I'll learn the sweet-making secrets...'
I've made a right pig's ear of it!
'..that make these products among the nation's favourites...'
Does shaking them stop them sticking together?
'..in what could be the most romantic factory in the world.'
One in four of the people who work here are actually in a relationship
with each other. No way!
I'm Cherry Healey,
and I'm going to find out how they put the writing in rock.
That is the letter E.
Wow! That's brilliant!
And that us Brits have very particular tastes
when it comes to sweets.
Holy Moley! Yeah, be brave.
I think my eyes have exploded.
And historian Ruth Goodman investigates
how sweets were first invented.
So fiddly.
I can't imagine doing an entire jar of these.
Over 100 million individual sweets are made,
wrapped and bagged at this factory every single day.
And we're going to show you the secrets of how it's done.
Welcome to Inside The Factory.
This is Swizzels in New Mills, Derbyshire.
One of the largest family-owned sweet factories in Britain.
And for those of you with a sweet tooth like me,
a very dangerous place to be.
HE LAUGHS
This five-storey factory spans over 25,000 square metres
and it's been pumping out sweets since 1940.
Tonight I'm going to show you how, in just 24 hours,
they can turn 56 tonnes of raw sugar into 100 million sweets.
I'll visit four parts of the factory
that make four different types of sweet.
Powdered, which are hard tablet sweets.
Boiled, where they make lollies.
Chews, where their bestseller is the Drumstick.
And finally jellies, where they make Squashies.
But before the factory can produce any of them,
we need a key ingredient.
Sugar.
They make over 50 different types of sweets in this factory.
And most of them start off life as one of these.
Over half of all the sugar we consume in the UK
is made from sugar beet.
It's harvested between September and February
on around 3,500 farms across the eastern counties.
It's processed in factories like this one in Norfolk,
that gets through three million tonnes of beet every year.
It's washed, cut into strips,
and then giant diffusing machines dissolve the sugar out of the beet
using hot water.
The sugary water is put through three separate boiling processes
to create sugar crystals.
These are then separated from the water, creating granulated sugar,
that's dried out, ready for shipping.
Two tankers like this one will make the 150-mile journey
to the sweet factory every single day.
'I'm in the loading bay with production manager Barry Land...'
No sweets without sugar, Barry. No.
'..to receive the first of those two sugar deliveries.'
This is 28 tonnes going in, is that right?
Yes. So, it's pretty much turning sugar around on a daily basis.
Yeah. So what's your worry, what keeps you awake at night?
The sugar not turning up. No sugar, we can't make any sweets.
Have you any idea how many unhappy children there'd be?
Can you feel that responsibility, Barry?
Yes, very heavy on my shoulders, you're right, Gregg!
'The pump on this lorry uses compressed air...'
I'm not manually pumping it out, am I?
'..to blow the sugar out of the tank
'and three storeys up to the top of a massive sugar silo.'
Let's do it!
Sugar's going in.
Let's make some sweets. Ha-ha-ha-ha!
First of all, I'm going to the powdered sweet department
to make Fizzers, Parma Violets and Love Hearts.
I'm starting at the top of the building, in the mixing room,
where the magic begins.
All powdered sweets are made in the same way.
By compressing different colours and flavours of powdered sugar.
Barry oversees this department.
The smell in here is unbelievable!
You could just walk around here licking it off the wall.
HE CHUCKLES
Barry, I've seen the sugar coming.
Now what do you do with it?
We get it into the factory just like granulated sugar,
but it's too coarse for us to do anything with.
So we have to mill it to a finer powder.
That's so it can take in a liquid, the binding agent, the colours.
The sugar, binding agent and colour
are mixed together in these machines.
Oh! No good to us.
Which turns the powder into a sticky mixture.
So the binding agent and the colour, because they're both liquid,
has made the dried sugar into, like, a putty.
Exactly. Right, then what happens?
It's no good to us being wet.
We need a dry powder.
So what's happening now, we're putting it through our dryers.
This dryer runs at 120 centigrade.
So in just ten minutes, the sticky mixture is dry again.
It looks exactly the same, but as you can tell, it's dry.
Some sweets fizz in your mouth when you eat them.
And that's down to two ingredients they add next.
Bicarbonate of soda, and malic acid.
They react together and release carbon dioxide,
but only when they come into contact with the water in saliva.
Next, they're adding flavour and I'm helping with the Parma Violets.
That's just a concentrated flavoured oil.
The violet flower has been used to flavour sweets
for hundreds of years, and inspired this sweet.
Although what we're adding is a synthetic version.
Taste it.
It's strong.
Why did you let me do that?!
I told you it was concentrated!
First of all you get the lovely violet flavour,
then it's like having your tongue scrubbed with washing-up liquid!
Don't forget, Gregg, you've just tasted enough
for over 1,000 Parma Violet tablets.
Where do I put it in? Follow me.
'Once the flavour has been added,
'the sugar mixture is ready to be turned into sweets.'
Well done, that's it, you've flavoured a mixture of Parma Violet.
Our mixture is now sent down to the second floor...
..and stored in a movable container.
They're each filled with different colours
and flavours of powdered sugar.
On the first floor below are the machines that press the sweets.
And they're fed with sugar
from the containers through funnels in the floor.
Right now, they're making Fizzers.
And they've just requested a fresh batch of powder.
Can I have a go, can I pull that out?
You go for it. Try it, Gregg.
Is that right? That's how it should be.
'Gravity is all that's needed
'to drop half a tonne of powder 15 feet down
'to the powder sweet pressing room.'
I've made a witch's brew here!
It's a bit of eye of frog and toe of newt, mate, isn't it?!
What's happening now, it's going to fall down
and we'll make tablets with that.
Before I learn the secrets of turning that powder into tablets,
Cherry is finding out about one of the most intriguing secrets
in the world of sweets.
# With me little stick of Blackpool rock... #
Coronation Rock has been making this sweet here in Blackpool since 1927,
producing up to 16,000 sticks a day.
Managing director Ian Atkinson knows all about the hard stuff.
Ian, I had absolutely no idea that rock came in so many flavours.
There are some extraordinary ones here.
We always used to make the traditional flavours,
you know, mint, fruit, pineapple.
Now, everyone wants something wacky.
We've got lager flavoured rock, gin and tonic rock.
We've got pizza flavoured rock, Marmite, we've got chicken tikka.
People really buy that? They buy it in big quantities.
It's really popular!
Ever since I was little, I've wondered,
how do you get the letters through the rock?
Why don't we go down to the factory now, you can try it?
Amazing. Yes, please! Come with me.
Confectioner David French has been making rock here for over 35 years.
Right, Cherry, what would you like? I think we should write
"Gregg's rock." Gregg's rock? I think he'd like that.
OK, then. Gregg's rock, it'll be.
The writing in rock is too small for any man or machine to make.
So to solve the problem, they make a giant stick of rock first,
and then stretch it to the right size.
To start the recipe,
they boil sugar and glucose at 149 degrees centigrade.
Then tip it onto water-cooled slabs.
We've got to cool it down so we can work with it.
Colour is added to some of the sugar.
A bit more.
'This will create the outer shell and the letters inside the rock.'
Oh, my gosh, it's fizzing!
Bubbling away.
'The temperature drops swiftly, but it's still 70 degrees.'
You can touch it? Just the edges.
Not for long, yeah, not for long.
Wow, it's amazing! It's like a runny egg.
You can lift that piece up, if you wish. Oh, I can't lift that!
How are you touching that?!
You have asbestos hands. I probably have, yes.
'Next up, the flavour needs to be added to the rock's core.'
What flavour would you like?
One of my favourite things in the whole world is salted caramel.
Is it possible to do that? Salted caramel, yes.
We could have salted caramel.
Right. That is strong!
I'll pour that into it.
Oh, wow. We're going to put this on the top now and seal it in.
Like a pie. Yeah.
'The rock's core is put in a special pulling machine
'for six minutes to aerate it.
'So it becomes white, brittle and easy to bite through.'
Almost like a giant whisk.
Yeah. Adding air.
'The coloured sugar used for the outer casing and the letters
'are worked by hand.'
Gregg's rock.
That's the letter E.
Wow! Yes, of course it is!
That's brilliant! It's so wonderful to see something made by hand.
You can make a letter C.
Put that inside it, OK?
Just like that? Yes, and turn it over.
And fold them pieces round the outside.
Is that it?
Oh, wow!
'The letters must be done quickly,
'as we've only got 20 minutes before the rock will be too hard to mould.'
What is the hardest letter to make?
The Q. The Q is one of my pet hates.
Really? Hate the Q?
The Q and the G. The Q and the G?
Oh, no, "Gregg's"!
We've got three!
I'm never going to eat a stick of rock the same way again.
I had no idea it took this much work.
Oh, yeah. Right, we get these spaces now.
'White strips are placed between the coloured letters.'
The letter R. Another piece of white. The letter E.
So that's the inside of a stick of rock.
'The letters can now be assembled with the rolled-out, aerated core.'
Wow, that is not light!
So one word is on the top and one is on the bottom. Right.
'Then it's all wrapped in a colourful casing.'
The scale is ridiculous.
It is huge!
That is hysterical.
Feels like we're making a stick of rock for a giant.
'To turn the 60kg colossal log of rock into a stick,
'we'll need to use the batch roller.'
And it will shape it into a cone shape at the front of the machine.
It still looks pretty massive.
It is pretty big at the moment, but it'll soon diminish
as we pull it out into smaller bars.
So you're really pulling it out by hand? Yeah.
So now, you just keep on pulling it out?
Yes. So you're twisting it to give it that recognisable twisty thing.
A nice spiral. If you karate chop that now, give it that karate chop.
Ha-cha!
Oh, wow!
Oh, it says "Gregg's rock"!
It does, it really does!
It worked. It really works! That's my credibility saved.
It's perfect. 'And finally, strings of rock
'are cut to the correct length by cutters...'
Great! '..and wrapped by hand.'
So here we are.
The first stick of Gregg's rock!
The E is very big.
The E is very big, yes.
Oh, wow!
I think Gregg's going to be very happy with that. I think he will be.
Three hours after the morning sugar delivery,
and I've seen sugar being milled,
coloured and flavoured.
'Now I'm with Barry in the powder pressing room on the first floor...'
What is that?! HE LAUGHS
'..where they'll turn it into sweets.
'And right now, they're making Fizzers.'
About 5,000 a minute are coming off this machine.
But the stuff upstairs was so fine, it was coming up in clouds.
I don't get how it's turned into a firm tablet, at all.
The secret to making these powdered sweets is the tablet press machine.
You can see where the punches are coming round.
The powder is coming down.
On those two wheels is where the punches are coming together.
Crushed on top, crushed on the bottom?
Pressured down between the two rollers.
These punches squeeze the powder together
under three tonnes of pressure,
to form a tablet sweet.
Do you want to have a go? What, turn it on, you mean?
No, turn the wheel. You'll see as it turns round...
Manually turn the three tonne... Manually turn it. Use your muscles!
Which way? Clockwise.
That's it! Go on, Gregg!
There it is. Told you!
There's my Gregg Fizzer.
All the powdered sweets are made in the same way.
Including what could be the most romantic sweet in the world.
The Love Heart.
They've been making them here since 1954.
And the recipe and design have barely changed in all that time.
Managing director Jeremy Dee
is third generation in the family business.
Have the messages changed over the years?
In the '80s we were trying to stay in touch
and stay current with technology, so we had "page me", "fax me".
I see. I think we took those out in the early part of this century.
So what's modern in the world of Love Hearts,
what's the newest messages?
We've got "#selfie".
We've got "take a selfie".
"Skype me". No!
"Tweet me", as well.
There must be guys and girls working here over the years
that have passed each other the odd sweet? Countless, Gregg.
We were actually voted Britain's most romantic workplace.
In fact, one in four of the people who work here
are actually in a relationship with each other.
So that's 61 couples.
No way! It's true.
One in four people who work here
have a relationship with someone else who works here? That's right.
Is the ease of the chat-up line on a Love Heart responsible for that,
do you think?! It may be.
It may be just the fact of working in a sweet factory
with magical, fun products!
# Je t'aime Je t'aime
# Oui, je t'aime
# Moi non plus... #
So many sweets, such little time.
We, each of us, on average consume 1,300 sweets a year.
But when did we start eating sweets?
It's hard to believe, but back in the Middle Ages,
sugar wasn't seen as a treat.
It was used as a medicine.
Sugar was considered to have healing properties
and was used to treat a whole host of illnesses.
I'm meeting with food historian Seren Evans-Charrington
to find out why.
When people came down with some form of ailment,
whether it be a sore throat or a digestive upset,
they were going into the spice cabinet
and looking what was in there.
So, you know, caraway seeds, coriander, nutmeg.
Cloves. And sugar was considered a spice.
And it was considered a medicinal product,
something that had great medicinal properties.
Eating sugar does release endorphins so they may not have understood why,
but it made our poorly ancestors feel better.
But it was expensive.
At one point, you know, this amount of sugar,
just this spoonful is a day's wages.
That would all change in the 16th century with the Tudors.
They opened trade routes that made sugar ten times cheaper
and they soon developed a sweet tooth.
It's when it becomes that little bit cheaper
that the balance begins to tip
and it starts being, "Actually, this is good for me,
"this is medicinal.
"But goodness, this tastes good!"
Not only did the Tudors love sugar,
but they wrongly believed it could stop flatulence
so served it after meals.
Seren's unearthed a recipe for Tudor comfits,
sweets made from medicinal spices
like liquorice roots and caraway seeds
covered in layers of sugar.
First, we melt half a pound of sugar
until it's boiling at around 130 degrees.
Ooh, look, it's bubbling up there.
Oh, yes.
'We're starting with the caraway seeds.'
They're so tiny!
'Once they've been coated, we remove them to cool down.'
This is the first coat.
We have 20 to 30 more coats more to go.
What we're looking to do is separate them out
and we want one caraway seed per comfit.
It's so fiddly and slow.
I can't imagine doing an entire jar of these.
'Next, we're sugar-coating strips of liquorice root.'
You can see they're not easy to get tidy.
No, they're not. It's a real art.
It's a real fiddle.
'After layer upon layer of messy sugar coating,
'we're finally able to try our first Tudor sweets.'
Actually, they look quite delicious.
They do, don't they? I'll try a little caraway seed.
Here we go.
Mmm!
It's a real capsule of flavour, isn't it?
That's sweet and very, very spicy.
Liquorice. Liquorice, that's the biggest.
It's too hard for my teeth!
If you were having some of those at the end of a meal
as some form of digestive aid, yeah, you'd remember it.
They may be basic, but these Tudor sugar-coated spices
were the forerunners of the modern boiled sweet.
Within 150 years, the first spice-flavoured sweets
like barley sugars and liquorice lozenges had appeared.
And we still enjoy those today.
It's been four hours since the sugar delivery
and already, this factory has made 30 million sweets.
I've been let into the secrets of making powder sweets.
Next stop is my favourite - boiled sweets.
With boiled sweets, instead of compressing dry sugar
like they do for powder sweets,
they turn it into a liquid and then mould it.
And team leader Bill Barnes is the man to show me how they do it.
He's been working here for over 40 years.
This is the best smell in a factory full of fantastic smells!
What is that? It's like blackcurrant.
It is today, Gregg.
We're making Fruity Pop lollies.
I'm going to show you, from start to finish, how we do them.
I'm in your hands, mate, go on.
We'll have a look. I'll show you what goes in the cooker first.
Sugar, glucose and water mixed together is called syrup.
This cooker boils the ingredients at 138 degrees centigrade
to dissolve the sugar and create a smooth syrup.
I'll just show you a bit if you want.
See how watery it is?
That will become a lolly.
It just looks like water out of the tap, doesn't it?
But it would take the skin off your fingers.
Bill is making over three-quarters of a million lollies today
and this isn't even his busiest time of the year.
When it comes up to Halloween, I will be running 22 hours a day.
I'll be running seven days a week and nights will come on.
I just can't make enough lollies.
Do you like that time or do you hate that time? I love it.
I've always got something to do.
Honestly, the more busy I am, I'm happy.
Why do you love this so much?
I've just been here all my life.
It's just what I do.
Have you yet added colour or flavour?
No, we're going to add it now.
After introducing colour and flavour to the sugar syrup,
they also add citric acid.
This is what naturally makes citric fruits tangy
and this man-made version does the same thing with sweets.
Whoa!
That's a pretty thing.
'The mix is then poured out onto a conveyor belt
'to start cooling down.'
That's a river of jam! Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Two ploughs fold the mixture over
so the top doesn't form a skin as it cools.
Next, it needs to be rolled into an even thickness
so it can be cut into lollies.
So now it's going to go over here into the batch rollers.
The liquid lolly mix falls onto the top of a plastic cone and flows
downwards as metal rollers spread it out to an even thickness.
Rollers at the bottom then pull it off the cone
in a perfectly uniform lolly snake.
I don't really understand.
Is it just gravity that pushes it?
Yeah, yeah, the weight, cos it's wider here, Gregg,
but it goes narrow, so it will always force it down into a point.
And you reckon every chunk of that now, if it's cut off at the
right lolly shape, that'll be about 8g? I'm hoping so.
Next, the lolly mix is cut into small pieces
and each one needs a stick.
Turning out 800 lollies a minute means this machine
gets through a lot of them.
Shall I put some sticks in? Only pick a few up at a time.
'The sticks are made from tightly rolled paper,
'so they're strong, but lightweight.'
GREGG LAUGHS
Isn't it harder than it looks, though? Honestly!
Deep inside this machine, the sticks are added,
but even though the lollies look finished,
they still need to cool for 20 minutes before they can be wrapped.
When it comes to sweets, we're creatures of habit.
Many of us choose the sweets we grew up eating as kids,
but how universal are our preferences?
Well, Cherry's off to find out.
As a nation, we've got some definite favourites when it comes to sweets.
In fact, some of the top-selling products have been around
for over 100 years.
So, what makes us go back to the same sweets time and time again?
'According to Professor Barry Smith of the University of London,
'it's down to our very British sense of taste.'
When we like sweets, it's not just the sugar. That's not it.
It's got to be the sugar in combination with other things.
There might be fruity flavours, there might be a bit of sourness.
There might be a bit of salt.
And then it's about the order in which things happen
when in the mouth.
'To prove his point, Professor Smith has asked me to eat a jelly baby
'and describe the flavours I'm experiencing.'
What do you get at first?
Sweet. Great. So you're getting the sugar coating straight away. Mm.
There's a bit of a burn, it's tangy.
Tangy, good. Fruity. That's the fruit. Really fruity.
So, the burn is interesting.
That's a little bit of the bitter sour acids.
What are you left with?
The sweetness and now it's over.
Now I'm sad. Did you like it?
I loved it.
That's the flavour profile that British people rather like -
from sweet to tangy fruit, bitter-sour, back to sweet.
That's a big hit. People like that.
'Of course, that could just be me so we've created an experiment with
'three identical-looking sweets
'that have three very different primary tastes.
'A is sweet, B is salty, C is sour.
'First, we're testing British people who, like me,
'should prefer the sweet taste of A.'
So, which one is the most familiar?
A. Is it quite a comforting taste, like, of your childhood?
Yeah, it tastes like wine gums.
I'm going to go this first one.
That's quite nice. You like it? Erm... Sweet. Sweet, yep.
Definitely the first one.
Yeah? Which is your favourite one?
I'm going to say A. It's a bit more fruity and, like,
I think I like that one more.
'The majority of Brits we asked really did prefer sweet A.'
But it turns out the sweets we love here
don't always go down well in other countries.
'Two parts of the world with extremely different tastes to us
'are Japan and Scandinavia.
'According to Professor Smith,
'the Scandinavians in this cafe should prefer sweet B,
'which starts with a salty taste.'
Eurgh!
Salt, salt, salt.
I feel like I need to drink a pint of water.
'But what will the Scandinavians think?'
The second one, B.
Definitely B. I'm B.
And do you eat lots of salt in the diet?
Massive. Salt. You like it?
Yeah, I like it. Would you have eaten sweets like this when you were
small, when you were young? Yes, salty liquorice in Sweden, yeah.
'Incredibly, 80% of Scandinavians chose salty sweet B,
'but what about Japanese people?
'They should show a strong preference
'for the sour flavour of sweet C.'
First impression? Wow! Wow.
Holy Moley!
Be brave. I think my eyes have exploded.
Gosh. They're very sour.
Mm-hm. Tangy, really tangy. Tangy.
Not getting loads of sweet.
Yes.
I prefer C. I think it's my favourite one.
Yes, it's the kind of flavour I used to eat in my childhood.
I like this one the best.
Right. It reminds me of the citrus fruit we have in Japan.
It turns out 60% of Japanese people we asked preferred sweet C.
So, that really worked.
The British people really went for the first option,
the Scandinavian people really loved the liquorice salty one.
They're used to having foods that have got high salt content.
They cure fish and meat with salt.
That's something that's in their background.
Most of the Japanese people really liked that
kind of citrus-y, sour flavour.
They preferred less sweet and, again, that'll be in the diet and,
of course, when we are exposed to different things,
either when we're children, it might even be in utero,
that's going to determine some of our palate, so there's a mixture of
biology and there's a mixture of culture.
Different countries might have different tastes,
but, judging from today, one thing is clear -
we all share a love for sweets.
Back at the factory,
I'm in the boiled sweet department with Bill Barnes, making lollies.
We've added the sticks, but they're still too hot to wrap.
Can I get one off? Yeah, yeah, just take one off.
Quite soft, aren't they? HE CHUCKLES
If you suck one of them now, the flavour comes out
because it's still warm.
Can I? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
'While it's hot, the flavour is released quicker,
'making it taste more intense.'
Am I one of the very few people lucky enough
to have had a hot lolly? Yeah!
'Next, the soft lollies need to harden
'before they can be wrapped...'
GREGG CHUCKLES
'..so they're sent to a special cooling machine.'
# Shake it up, baby, now Shake it up, baby
# Shake it up, baby Twist and shout
# Shake it up, baby Shake it up, baby
# Come on and work it on out... #
This is actually called a cooler.
The lolly will go in on the top tray, goes down, down, down
and we introduce cold air in it, and all.
That's on the bottom tray.
20 minutes. Does shaking them stop them sticking together?
If you didn't have it shaking, they'd just go down
and they'd flatten on that top tray, cos they're still soft.
So, because they roll like that, they keep the shape.
You know that looks a little bit nuts, Bill, don't you?
Yeah. It's good, isn't it, though?
It's fantastic.
'Finally, the lollies are sent to wrapping machines
'that can each wrap 800 lollies a minute.
'But before they're sent to be boxed up,
'there's just one thing left to do - unofficial quality control.'
Cheers!
Jeremy'll tell us off.
That's 10p.
Sweets are an occasional treat, a guilty pleasure, but,
as Ruth Goodman's been learning,
when sugar took off in the 18th century,
we really did have something to be guilty about.
'By the mid-1700s, we had become a nation of sugar addicts.
'Cheap sugar imported from the British West Indies
'was being enjoyed by rich and poor alike.
'Bristol was the main port bringing sugar into Britain and merchants
'grew fat on the profits, building huge mansions
'that still stand today.'
But cheap sugar came at a heavy price,
with the entire industry based upon slavery.
'I'm heading to one of those Georgian mansions,
'that's now a museum,
'and I'm meeting with historian Sue Giles
'to find out about the human cost of Britain's sweet tooth.'
The level of labour on a plantation
meant you needed huge numbers of people.
They couldn't get that from indentured labour,
people going out on a seven-year contract from Europe,
so the enslaved labour force was the only way, really, of doing it.
Our insatiable appetite for sugar was driving a slave trade that was
unparalleled for its time.
How many people did Britain enslave?
The numbers carried on British ships in the 18th century
were anything up to three million.
As many as one in three slaves on those ships
didn't survive the journey from Africa and, for those that did,
conditions on the plantations were shocking.
Until the late 1700s,
the British public had turned a blind eye to the horrors of the
slave trade, but now we were finally developing a conscience.
From about the 1760s onwards,
there was a lot of discussion about the slave trade,
whether it was ethical, whether it was right, whether it was Christian.
And then, slowly, more and more people became aware of it and there
was this growing abolition movement.
The abolitionists knew that sugar and slavery went hand in hand.
One supporter of abolition, Fox,
he wrote a pamphlet calling on people to boycott sugar.
"An address to the people of Great Britain,
"proving the necessity of refraining from sugar and rum,
"in order to abolish the African slave trade."
Fox said that if you ate a pound of sugar,
you were consuming human flesh, because so many Africans had died in
creating this sugar that you were eating.
So, he was asking people to stop eating sugar -
stop buying it, stop consuming it.
Mm, yes. And did they?
Yes. About 300,000 people, maybe more, joined the boycott.
This sugar boycott would become a powerful weapon
for the abolition movement.
They produced a logo and a slogan.
The slogan was, "Am I not a man and a brother?"
And later on, they also brought in, "Am I not a woman and a sister?"
And sugar bowls that promoted sugar, made not by slaves, but by free men.
All your friends who came to tea would know where you stood
on the sugar subject and grocers reported that sugar sales
dropped by about a third. Now, that's quite a lot.
It really is just like the modern fair-trade campaign, isn't it?
Respecting other people's labour in other parts of the world.
It was also a way that people, ordinary people,
could actually do something about the slave trade
by hitting it where it hurt - in the profit and the money.
That is such a modern idea, isn't it?
That you can change the world through your shopping habits. Mm.
In 1807, the slave trade was finally ended in the British Empire
and it might not have been possible without the public's backlash
against sugar made by slaves.
The 1791 boycott of sugar was one of the first examples of the
British public demanding ethically sourced goods.
It was powerful consumer action
and one that changed the course of history for ever.
Five hours after the morning sugar delivery
and the factory has produced 35 million sweets.
I've made powder sweets and boiled sweets.
Next up is the chew sweets.
And their top seller is the Drumstick lolly.
Team leader Paul Jones has been overseeing their production
for more than ten years.
The first part we're going to go to is what we call the Tyrell and
this is where the syrup is actually made.
This vat contains glucose, sugar, water and vegetable oil.
And as you can see, that's the syrup there now
and it's just ready for cooking.
How many sweets will that make?
An awful lot. We're running at about 1,200kg an hour
and we probably make 120,000 Drumsticks.
'These lollies start their life in the same way as boiled sweets.
'The syrup is heated up to 125 degrees centigrade
'to dissolve the sugar.'
It doesn't smell the same any more. It smells like toffee.
That's what it basically is.
We've just basically got a syrup hot mix.
MUSIC: HARRY POTTER THEME
Next, they add a magic ingredient that transforms the syrup
into a chewy sweet...
..marshmallow foam.
So, I can show you, here, a bit of marshmallow.
It's a mix of gelatine and glucose
that's been whipped up in an aerating machine.
Could I taste some? Yeah, course you can.
I thought that was going to be really sweet.
It's not. Why do you add the marshmallow foam?
It's to make it, rather than being a hard-boiled sweet,
we've now added in a foam to make it chew.
Without the foam, it would be like a hard-boiled sweet?
Yeah.
This sugar syrup and marshmallow mixture is divided into two parts
for the different coloured stripes in the lolly.
From this point on, we're going to add the flavours in this point
and the colours.
One half has milk flavour and citric acid added.
The other half has raspberry flavour and colour added.
That's looking like the sweet.
White one side, pink the other.
Don't touch it, cos it's over 100 degrees centigrade.
It doesn't look like it, but it is.
You'll have never felt so alive if you touch it.
This greased conveyor belt has water running underneath it
to cool the mixture.
But it's cooling as it's travelling.
It will be in the next seven sections.
Love it!
After less than a minute on the belt,
the mix has cooled to exactly 45 degrees centigrade.
It's now ready to be collected and sent on
to the next stage of the process.
Let me have a go of this, please.
Right, I'll get you some gloves. Can I? Yeah.
Is that one ready? That one's ready and that one's ready.
No pressure. There you are.
Oh!
Agh!
Oh! Agh!
Got him!
Oh, I've got some pink in my white!
Cover it over so no-one sees.
'Next stop, one of the strangest places in the factory...
'..the slab room.'
Here, blob wrangler Steve Gough
forms the chew mix into disc shapes and,
when it's cooled to just the right firmness,
he feeds it into the batch roller.
How difficult is this?
Not hard. Not hard?
No. Have you got to be strong?
Yes.
Yay-hey-hey!
As Steve feeds them into the batch roller,
all I've got to do is stop them from sticking together.
MUSIC: Baby Elephant Walk by Lawrence Welk
Oh, no! Oh, no... HE CHUCKLES
It's sticking to it!
Right, you handle these really simply.
I've made a right pig's ear of it.
This cone of stickiness is bigger than a football at the top end,
but it tapers down to the size of a 2p coin at the bottom
as rollers slowly pull the mixture out.
MUSIC: Regret by Everything Everything
The lolly snake now enters a machine that can cut it,
squash it around a stick, and wrap it in just a quarter of a second.
Machine operator Emma Bartley has been working at the factory
for just six months.
Did you see me put that pink slab on?
You did really well.
If you don't put it in right, you won't get the swerve right.
You seem to be a bit of a Drumstick expert.
I've had my family work here since about the 1960s,
so both grandmothers used to work here, my brother worked here,
I've had five cousins that work here.
My mum and dad met here and my mum left to have me, so here I am.
So, your mum and dad met here.
Have you got... Have you met anyone here?
I've met plenty of friends here.
Yeah, but I mean... No!
Anyone you like the look of?
Cos I could quickly put a word in for you.
Oh, I'll have to have a word with you about that secretly.
This firm has been family run since it opened in the 1920s.
In fact, Britain has a fine tradition
of family-run confectionery businesses.
Cherry's been learning how one Lancashire family turned a
niche product into a worldwide success.
I'm finding out about a very special sweet that's been clearing noses and
soothing throats for over 100 years.
'Here in Fleetwood, Lancashire, the Lofthouse family
'has been making Fisherman's Friends since 1865.
'Today, their 37,000-square metre site
'employs 350 staff with an annual turnover of £47 million.
'This sweet success story was originally a solution to a
'very local seafarers' problem.
'I'm going onboard Fleetwood's last remaining trawler, now a museum,
'to meet Tony Lofthouse.
'His great-grandfather James had an apothecary shop in town
'and first invented this cough medicine
'for Fleetwood's deep-sea trawlermen.'
Trawlers in those days
were beginning to go into colder and colder waters
and this weather affected the fishermen's chests,
so they made a liquid, a linctus.
The linctus worked fine, but the bottles broke at sea,
so he went and had another think and he came up
with the same sort of thing, but in a solid form,
in a lozenge, and they started to take those.
It's so clever. How did it get its name?
They used to go in the shop and say,
"Could I have some of my friends, please?" So, Fisherman's Friend.
At the factory, Tony has collected some family treasures from the
old apothecary shop, including the original cough syrup.
We have one single bottle left.
Wow! So, this is very precious. Very precious, yes.
I'm really nervous to hold it.
"Dose - five to 15 drops on sugar, three times a day after food."
I'm going to give that back to you,
because that is a little piece of British history... Thank you.
..and I don't want to drop it. Me neither!
Once Tony's great-grandfather turned the syrup into cough sweets,
for over 100 years, it was sold mostly to local fishermen.
But, after the fishing industry declined in the 1970s,
the family decided to look to other markets.
Tony's wife Doreen had the idea to start selling the throat sweets
to shops around the country.
They proved so popular
that the company has continued to grow ever since.
Today, they make five billion lozenges a year
and sell to over 100 different countries.
The original flavour throat sweet is made using sugar, liquorice,
menthol and eucalyptus oil,
but that's not the only flavour they make.
We have 15 different flavour variants.
Tropical? Tropical!
'Duncan Lofthouse now runs the company
'and he's fifth-generation in the family business.'
97% of our output is exported.
What's the strangest place you export to?
Papua New Guinea, maybe.
Who likes the cherry ones?
That is the favourite in our second biggest market, which is Thailand.
They love cherry in Thailand?!
Yes, indeed. It's looked upon as a strong-flavoured candy.
How funny! Absolutely.
It's been so wonderful today
to see something so quintessentially British is loved around the world.
I'm at the Swizzels factory in New Mills, Derbyshire.
In just six hours, they've turned nearly 22 tonnes of sugar
into 40 million sweets.
In the jellies department on the first floor,
they make classic gummy sweets using sugar, glucose and gelatine.
But one of their sweets follows a different recipe.
It was invented five years ago
and is now the company's bestselling product.
Carl Pilkington oversees their production.
What are we making here? We're making Squashies.
Squashies would just be a normal jelly sweet if it wasn't for
one very special ingredient.
We use apple pulp down here.
Apple pulp? Apple pulp, yes.
That's to hold the body, that's to make the product stay together.
Wow. How does that work? Do you know? I'm not very good at chemistry. When you've got gelatine,
it's very stretchy and you're putting air inside that and you want
that to hold the air in, otherwise it'll all collapse and just become a
jelly, but, because we want it to be a foam product,
we put apple pulp in. It makes it strong. It holds on to the air.
After adding colour and flavour,
the mix is pumped to the depositing room.
Now, here's where we start making the sweets.
This is where it's squirted into moulds.
Do you know how many of these you're making a day?
There's 240 on there.
240 sweets on a tray and you're doing a tray,
like, nearly every second.
That's millions and millions of sweets.
Millions and millions of sweets, yes.
From here, these trays of gooey sweets need to be put in the oven.
Can I put this in the oven? Sure. Where's the oven?
The oven's just down there. It's oven three.
'Because of their moisture content,
'they'll need to bake at 38 degrees centigrade for 24 hours
'to dry them out.'
It's quite a tight space, mate, innit? Very, very tight space.
'That means, of all the sweets in the factory,
'these take the longest to make.'
Straighten it up. Just watch your wall, there.
You made it! You've filled your first oven.
'They've got eight of these ovens running 24/7,
'which is how they can produce
'1.5 billion individual sweets every year!'
So, now you can touch one. Can I eat it? Of course you can.
Yeah, it's not an easy texture to make, is it?
No. It's neither hard nor soft.
No, not at all.
It took three months of trial and error
to create the recipe for Squashies.
'And Cherry's on the third floor of the factory
'to meet the woman who did it.'
Behind this door is the research and development department.
It's where they come up with all the new sweet ideas.
I'm just a little, tiny bit excited.
'Linda Hallam knows how hard it is to come up
'with a successful new product.
'Her team create as many as 80 new sweets every year,
'but because us Brits are so fussy,
'just 5% of her inventions make it onto our shelves.
'She's agreed to let me try
'and create my very own version of sherbet.'
So, are these the three ingredients in sherbet?
That's what you're going to use.
What is anhydrous citric acid?
It's the sharpness that you get in powder.
And sodium bicarbonate?
That's what you use in your cooking and your baking.
Blend the two together and that's what gives you fizz.
It's like a science experiment. It's lots of fun!
'Recipes for sherbet date back as far as the mid-1800s and the key is
'getting the right proportions.
'We're combining 500g of sugar with 20g of citric acid
'and 14.6g of bicarbonate.'
Is it awful that I want to put a bit more citric acid in?
Because I remember, as a child, having sherbet
and it would just blow my head off. Off you go!
Really? We can have a super-sour.
Yeah, yeah, yeah! Let's do it.
'Citric acid activates the sour receptors on the tongue
'and it's the ingredient you'll find in most sour sweets.
'Next, I'm adding a synthetic flavour.'
I love cotton candy...
..but I love chocolate more.
I think that's a people pleaser.
What about a cherry chocolate gateau?
I mean, everyone loves cake. Cake's a winner, surely?
'I'm also adding red colour to my mix.
'In 2007, a study linked artificial colours
'to hyperactivity in children,
'so, at this factory, they now don't use them in their sweets.
'The natural colour I'm using is made from beetroot.'
So, for red, you use beetroot.
We can use beetroot or we can use grape skins.
What's this? Why do you need a grey colour?
There aren't that many grey sweets on the market.
That's actually one which we don't use any more.
It's cochineal.
What is cochineal? They're little beetles.
What?! Those are beetles?
Yeah. Are you kidding?
So, we actually used it in our Rainbow Drops
and we had comments that they weren't vegetarian any more,
so we decided to remove it.
But it's grey. It's not when it's been processed.
When you actually crush it down and add water,
it's a really nice, vibrant pink colour.
The cochineal beetle lives on a cactus in South America and has been
used as a red dye for hundreds of years.
It may be all natural,
but I'm glad it's not making its way into my sherbet.
Do you think it's ready? I think so.
Get ready, Linda. Buckle up!
Whoo!
It's a little bit on the, erm, sharp side.
Yeah. I'm six years old again, eating sherbet.
I really like that.
I think I'm going to name it...
Oh! ..Cherry Gateau Surprise.
Right. It's not very original.
So, what do we do next?
We actually need to go out and have it tested on people.
'Whenever the development department come up with a new product,
'they test it out on the workers here first.
'Time to find out if I've invented the next big thing.'
Can I interest you in a little dip of sherbet?
This is a new flavour that I've just created.
Is your eye twitching?
MOUTH FULL: Bloody hell!
That's quite fizzy. Very fizzy, OK.
What do you think the flavour is?
I reckon it could be strawberry.
It's like a marzipan taste.
It's a bit lemony.
A little bit appley.
Appley? Perhaps.
Ras...raspberry?
Is it cherry?
Yes! Well done!
Is there a hint of anything else there?
Cherry and...? Chocolate.
Oh, my gosh, you win the prize!
What do I get? You get more sherbet.
Yaay!
Once was enough for today, I think.
'It looks like I may have made my sherbet a bit too sour.
'Maybe that's why no-one can tell what flavour it is.'
I think, after all that, I can safely say
that it's back to the drawing board.
And maybe I won't give up my day job just yet.
All around the factory, millions of sweets are being wrapped,
bagged and boxed...
..whether it's with hi-tech robot arms or the old-fashioned way.
Soon, there will be powdered and boiled sweets,
jellies and chews ready to be dispatched.
On the ground floor of the powder sweet department,
I'm helping Adele Thomas and Julia Hughes on the packing line.
Why would you shake them like that?
Because any tablets that are broken or half-tablets
will fall through those holes.
Down here, they're just having a dance.
It's where they get straightened up into the channels.
Oh! That checks for holes...
Yep. ..that puts them in straight lines.
Yep. Do you know what this reminds me of?
No. The M25!
'This machine can wrap 100 packets of sweets every minute,
'but it's down to Adele and Julia to check the quality
'and then box them up.'
You put 24 in the box.
Yeah, but how do I know I've got 24?
Because when they're in right, they lie flat.
Three rows? Three rows of eight.
But if you're picking them up in a big chunk like that,
you're not checking the quality.
I am!
Years of experience. You can feel the good and the bad.
All good.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven...
I'm not very good at this, am I?
Give you another 28 years, you'll be able to do it perfect.
MUSIC: Hey Brother by Avicii
24 hours ago, we had 56 tonnes of raw sugar.
I've seen it coloured and flavoured, pressed, boiled, stretched,
rolled and wrapped.
Now, in this distribution warehouse,
there are 100 million sweets ready to be dispatched.
They'll head across the UK, with the Welsh taking the crown
for eating the most sweets,
but they're also sent all over the world,
from Australia to Norway,
where they eat more Love Hearts per person than anywhere else.
And all of these sweets come from
this traditional, family-run sweet factory in Derbyshire.
It's impossible to escape the sense of tradition here.
I mean, they're making sweets that I grew up with.
I can clearly remember having them as a child,
going to my local shop with my pennies.
And it's great to see that the art of British sweet-making
is still going strong today.
And do you know what I love more than absolutely anything?
It's obvious that Britain has got just as sweet a tooth
as it had 50 years ago when I had my first sweets.
'Next time, I'm being let inside
'the largest sports shoe factory in the UK...'
I made this shoe right from the very beginning.
'..to see how they make 3,500 trainers in just 24 hours.'
I've broke it.
'And Cherry is let into the intriguing secrets of shoe design.'
Is that really going to hold my weight?
CLICK! Whoa!
'And historian Ruth Goodman investigates the surprising origins
'of the trainer from the back streets of Bolton.'
Reebok? Reebok is British?!