Hot soup on a cold day, you can't beat it.
It's like a cuddle in a cup.
No wonder we get through more than 600 million bowls of it each year.
Stick all that in tins and it would fill
more than 10,000 of these lorries.
And to see how it's done,
I've come to this soup-er sized factory.
What we're doing at this point is checking that the can... Whoa! Whoa!
I'm Gregg Wallace.
Everything about this is just breakneck speed.
Tonight, I'm following the un-pea-lievable production...
It looks like a load of glowing red molten lava.
..of this family favourite.
There shouldn't be that much engineering in a tin of soup.
I'm Cherry Healey.
Ooh. There we go.
I'll be discovering the hunger-busting secrets
behind this simple meal,
and heading into the salty stronghold of seasoning.
It looks like a winter wonderland.
Historian Ruth Goodman... RUTH LAUGHS
..dishes up the surprising origins of this one-bowl wonder.
That's an exotic flavour, isn't it?
Exotic. That's precisely the word I was looking for.
Over the next 24 hours, this factory will produce
two million tins of soup.
Welcome to Inside The Factory.
This is the Heinz factory on the outskirts of Wigan.
The team here on this 54-acre site
produce more than one billion tins of food every year.
That includes baked beans, spaghetti hoops and macaroni cheese,
along with 59 different varieties of soup
from big and beefy to carrot and coriander.
Today, we're following production of their classic vegetable soup
in 400 gram tins - each one contains tomatoes, carrots, potatoes,
beans, pasta, onions, swedes and peas.
The peas arrive here frozen but, of course,
they don't start out that way.
I'm heading two hours east to the Vale of York.
Here, one farm devotes 77 square miles
to growing this vibrant green crop.
Hartley's produce 1,000 tonnes of peas a year for our soup.
There are 4.4 million plants in this field alone.
So harvest time from June to August
is especially busy for pea operations manager Paul Saxon.
Paul... Morning, Gregg.
Pleasure to be out here, mate. A bit of fresh air. Yeah.
So, what makes the perfect pea for a tin of soup?
Well, you want a standard garden pea
and it needs to be quite mature, a little bit firm,
which then helps when it goes through the production lines
and through into the cans.
Peas are actually the seeds of the plants, or vines.
These are so crunchy and sweet, they're lovely.
When ripe, they only stay in pea-k condition
for two days before they start to go tough and starchy.
So Paul has to be quick to bring in the crop.
I used to grow peas.
If you can't get these on your plate within 24 hours, don't bother...
Yeah. ..which is why you freeze them. That's right.
These have got to go from the field
to the factory in under 150 minutes.
You've got to do it in two and a half hours!
We certainly have. Does that keeps you awake at night?
It just gives me a few headaches now and again, yeah.
Paul's harvesting team works around the clock
whatever the weather.
Oh, that's... Back up.
Back up. That is a monster, isn't it?
These 24-tonne state-of-the-art giants
are called pea viners.
They might move slowly but only take around an hour
to pick this 11-acre field.
This seems too big for a delicate thing like a pea.
How does this work?
So, what we have at the front here, it's like a giant comb.
The fingers rotate and strip 95% of the vine up on to a conveyor,
which takes it up into the back of the machine.
Giant comb! Basically, it's just like vigorously brushing the hair
of the field. That is not what I expected at all.
Nice piece of kit.
Very nice piece of kit.
Come on, Gregg. Let's go for a spin.
Space Age, isn't it?
Paul drops the giant comb into position.
The pea plants are scooped up and production begins.
BEEPING
Is this the way you always do it? All the harvesters in a row? Yeah.
To me, it looks like you're formation harvesting.
You are the farming equivalent of the Red Arrows.
As each pea viner swoops over the ground,
its comb claws in the plants
and breaks off the peapods, which are sent into a revolving drum.
Inside there, soft blades like spatulas knock the pods open
and release the peas.
Ah! Those are now the peas entering the hopper.
The stalks, pods and leaves are dropped to the ground.
How much weight in there once that hopper's full?
It holds between two and three tonnes.
Over 24 hours, each harvester collects 60 tonnes -
around 85 million individual peas.
It's all about speedy peas,
getting them into the trailer and away as quick as possible.
Here he is. Now we lower the hopper.
Agh. It's like a little drawbridge.
Wow! Look at the speed.
GREGG LAUGHS Look at that!
They are flying off of there.
Brilliant. That didn't take long.
Everything about this is just breakneck speed.
But it's got to be, hasn't it? It certainly has.
It's got to be. The clock is ticking. It's all about time.
Paul, thank you. That's been an education.
It really has. Thank you, sir.
Just 20 minutes after being picked, ten tonnes of peas
cascade into a lorry ready to go off for freezing.
In Britain, it's believed we were eating these a-pea-ling vegetables
even before the Romans came.
But when did our love affair with soup begin?
Ruth investigates.
People around the world have been boiling liquidy concoctions
over flames since as far back as 13000 BC.
But 500 years ago, people in England
were eating something more like this.
A sort of broth of meat or fish, packed full of vegetables
and thickened with grain or pulses.
And they called it pottage.
The word "pottage" came from old French and simply meant
something in a pot.
There was no recipe as such.
You just tossed whatever ingredients you had to hand into a cauldron.
I mean, it certainly looks similar to soup,
but when exactly did it stop being called pottage and become soup?
To find out, I'm in Sussex at the grand ruins of Cowdray House...
..where food historian Glyn Hughes is working on some clues
to this soupy mystery.
Glyn... GLYN LAUGHS
Nice to see you again. Hello, Ruth. Marvellous to see you.
So, when exactly does pottage change into soup?
Interestingly, we can trace the origin of soup to the 17th century
and, particularly in England, to this man, Robert May,
who was a master cook.
Robert May trained in Paris before working in noble English households.
This is his kitchen in Cowdray House, which astonishingly...
Is still here. ..is still here.
And he wrote this wonderful, wonderful book,
The Accomplished Cook, published in 1660
with dozens of recipes for soup.
It's the first time we've actually got it written down...
As to what a soup is. Actually what a soup is.
And it's spelt S-O-O-P - soup.
And there's one in particular.
A soup or buttered meats of spinach. We've got to try this.
This just sounds so interesting. Yes, we have.
We take fine young spinach and give it a warm or two. Warm or two.
Wilt down the spinach, basically.
So, we're putting in "some." Yeah.
Well, that looks like "some" spinach. It looks like "some" spinach to me.
Hundreds of years ago, cookery books often didn't give quantities
or a lot of detail.
We have to mince it small.
Mince it small. Mince it small.
Now we want some sliced dates.
They were expensive, so I think that must be plenty.
Next is some butter. Some... A knob of butter, perhaps?
I would have said a knob and a half?
RUTH LAUGHS
And so we want some white wine.
Oh, good stuff.
You reckon more? Of course I reckon more.
We also add cinnamon and currants.
Special, costly ingredients like these meant this recipe
would only have been for the upper classes.
And some sugar. I think we ought
to treat this like a spice, shouldn't we? Yes, absolutely.
So one pinch of sugar.
And you've now got to stew them well together.
In it goes.
After five minutes simmering, this slightly sweet and fruity mixture
doesn't look much like a modern soup.
And the recipe has another unusual aspect.
So, I noticed it said, "Serve it upon sippets."
Yes, it said, "Serve it upon sippets, finely carved,"
which is decorated pieces of bread.
They get mentioned in English cookery books from the Middle Ages,
right up until Victorian times.
Why don't we do this any more? Right.
A bit of that on there. This is certainly not what we would call
soup these days, is it? It's not, is it?
That's an exotic flavour, isn't it? Exotic.
That's precisely the word I was looking for.
You don't like it, do you? Um... No. No.
It's rather strange, soggy spinach.
The earlier pottage is much closer to what we know as soup.
I think what's probably happened is the word starts off
in the aristocratic houses first and then people go,
"Ooh, that's a bit posh, that,
"we'll start using that name for our stuff."
Just like we've stopped calling egg pie, "egg pie."
And started calling it quiche. Exactly.
So I think that's the same thing that happened here.
The word "soup" has come to cover many of the older pottages.
So it's a renaming in a way. I think so, yeah.
Yeah, that sounds very reasonable.
Here's to... Here's to soup. Here's to soup. Yeah. Absolutely.
In Yorkshire, we're making 21st-century soup.
And our ten-tonne pile of peas
is racing to this processing plant.
They've been freezing veg here for nearly 40 years.
This is the 13th load of the day and it's being guided in
by pea processing manager Sam Madden.
Nice to meet you, Gregg.
How often do you get a load come in?
Every hour. No way! Yeah.
There's not that many peas in the world! There is in Yorkshire.
But how do we unload 'em? Cos that's a delicate load.
We just do it like this.
Whoa! That is coming out a lot faster than I thought.
They unload five tonnes at a time.
A big green avalanche of seven million peas.
I can't believe you just tip them out.
Yeah, just tip them out straight away.
Two minutes later, and they're all on their way to join the party
inside the processing plant.
But first, they need washing,
and then sorting inside a kind of wind machine.
Mate, I'm getting smothered in peas. It's raining peas.
This is flowing air into this chamber
to separate the bits of broken peas away from the full peas.
So, the broken peas come to the sides here
and then the peas fall down here.
As you can see, we've got bits of still full pods
that are coming from the field.
So we have grids, which the peas will fall through
and the pods will continue all the way out to the end,
and come out the other side.
Oh, they've gone down the back of my neck!
An hour and 42 minutes since they were harvested,
these millions of little fellas begin their adventure.
It's like a pea water park.
They shoot down a flume,
whoosh through a tunnel, and ride down some rapids.
Then cameras inspect them and disqualify any bad'uns.
Only the best are sent on for processing.
This is where we blanch the peas.
They're not going to get frozen straight away? No, not yet.
First, they're blanched with steam.
Then they're sprayed with near boiling water.
Now, if I blanch something at home, like a vegetable, like a carrot,
quickly in and out of hot water...
Yeah. ..just to soften it before I roast it.
But why do YOU blanch peas?
We're doing the same process, but we're doing it
to denature an enzyme - stopping it from working.
Deactivating. Deactivating it.
What is the enzyme? It's copper oxidate.
This enzyme will still degrade the peas, even whilst they're frozen.
I've always thought that once we freeze something,
it's going to stay in that same state.
No. Incredible.
Left alone, the frozen peas would last eight weeks.
Deactivating that enzyme will lock-in their colour and nutrients
for 18 months. I love peas.
You could say I'm a bit of a pea nut. A peanut!
HE LAUGHS
Now, blanched peas, right? Yeah, that's correct.
Ooh, they're cool. Absolutely. It will be cold. Yeah.
And that's to stop them cooking.
Yes. They're softer. Yeah.
But the taste is virtually the same. Well, it is the same.
Exactly. Are they now ready for freezing?
Absolutely. The peas are now being transported up
where they'll be frozen. I almost feel sorry for them. Yeah.
It takes eight minutes for the peas
to travel through the 12-metre blast freezer.
Well, that's cold. How cold is that?
That's minus 35. They're bouncing up and down.
Mind you, if I was in there, I think I'd bounce up and down. Yeah.
So, basically, we have bouncing sides that will lift the peas up
into the air, so that the cold air can get all the way
round the peas to make sure they're frozen to the core.
How many peas going through there?
It's five tonnes per hour going through.
Incredible. Pretty cool, hey?
GREGG LAUGHS
The fully frozen peas are ready for packing.
They shuffle down into drop pans and when the weight hits ten kilos,
they're poured into plastic bags.
These packs of peas are a bit bigger than the ones I buy for my dinner.
Stan, thank you very much for showing. Thank you. Thank you.
Well, that's one of the six veg for our soup sorted.
Peas are more delicate than lots of other fruit and veg,
which can be stored fresh for longer.
But which is better when it comes to keeping in nutrients -
is it frozen or fresh?
Cherry's at Chester Food Market
to meet nutritional biochemist Dr Sohail Mushtaq.
Hi, Sohail. Hi, Cherry. Nice to meet you.
I've always thought fresh is best.
If you want all of the nutrients, go fresh.
It's not that simple, Cherry.
If you're talking fresh, as in picked from your allotment
or your garden, then fresh is definitely your best.
But supermarket fresh is something entirely different,
because they harvest their vegetables,
then they'll end up in transit and in the warehouse.
And all of this time, they're losing
some of that nutrient content.
To get the numbers on those nutrients, Sohail's brought me
to the University of Chester.
Oh, look. Lovely.
Peas. Sprouts. Carrots.
How would you compare the nutritional properties
between fresh and frozen?
So, we're going to look at the vitamin C content.
It's a very important vitamin.
It supports our immune system and keeps us healthy.
It's a very good indicator of overall nutritional content.
So if there's a loss in vitamin C, there's generally a loss
in all the other nutrients. Exactly. So, grab some sprouts. Ooh.
I'll grab some peas and we'll go and do the analysis.
Let's do some science.
Oh! There we go.
Helping us prepare the samples...
Mash, mash, mash. ..is food scientist Stuart Crofts.
It's definitely whizzing around.
A centrifuge removes the solids and leaves
just the liquid fruit and veg.
We've put a sample of each one into a chromatography machine,
which separates out the vitamin C.
So, we've got all our samples.
The Brussels sprouts, the peas,
the carrots, the raspberries, the onions.
We'll put it in here. Exactly.
That's going to come through here
into what we call a spectrophotometer, and that shines
different wavelengths of light into the sample.
So, it's going to tell us which has more vitamin C... Yeah.
..the frozen sample or the fresh sample. Exactly.
So, the results are in. We'll start with carrots.
Oh. There's not very much in it between the fresh
and the frozen, pretty much of a muchness here.
On to the next one. Onions.
The frozen's almost double the amount of vitamin C
than the fresh. Oh, that's so interesting.
I really thought that it would be the same.
And for peas, the vitamin difference is even greater.
Whoa. Frozen is a winner.
Look at that! Absolutely.
Almost six times more vitamin C than the fresh variety.
The producers must be very peas-ed with that result.
And these frozen sprouts do better still - about eight times
the vitamin level of the fresh.
I had no idea that there was this much difference.
The fresh version in this case came from South Africa.
So there's a long transit time and they're possibly losing
some of their nutrient content in the journey, whereas the frozen
were probably frozen fairly soon after harvesting
and therefore locking in the nutrients.
So far, our results show vegetables that degrade quickly,
or take a long time to get from field to supermarket,
hit better nutritional figures when frozen.
What's next? Raspberries.
Oh, the tables have turned.
Fresh has got double the amount that frozen has.
Fresh for the win.
These results are for summer raspberries,
but when they tested them bought in winter, they found
the opposite, with frozen easily beating fresh.
Why are the results so different?
I think the answer to that is seasonality.
The raspberries in the summer, they're in season,
and they get to the supermarket fairly quickly,
and in the winter, when they're not in season,
they're probably imported from other countries.
So, if you want your raspberries to have that full nutritional punch,
you want to eat them in the summer. Exactly.
But, out of season, maybe go for frozen. Absolutely.
Whichever way wins the vitamin test,
all fruit and veg are good for our health.
But the less time fresh produce is stored, the better.
I've always bought frozen fruit and veg for the convenience.
I never thought that they would have
the same nutritional levels as fresh.
And when it comes to sprouts and peas, significantly higher.
Winner, winner, frozen veg dinner.
Two hours north of where the peas were frozen
is our monumental food factory near Wigan.
It's nearly three times as big as Buckingham Palace.
Well, it is one of the largest soup manufacturers in Europe.
Three hours and 35 minutes into production,
the frozen peas are heading into
the 1,700 square metre open-plan kitchen.
Every can of soup starts off in the preparation area,
where I'm meeting process co-ordinator Ian Waite.
Ian... Hello, Gregg. All right, my friend.
How many peas have you got on that pallet? About 900 kilos.
Nearly a tonne of peas. Will they all go into soup?
Yes. In vegetable soup today.
And how many tins of soup would that make?
About 64,000 tins.
How big's my batch? How many tins?
About 10,000 tins. Right. Come on. Come on. We've got work to do.
All these ingredients are going to go in this container.
So, what's in here already?
We've got fresh carrots. Right.
If we can get stuff fresh from the supplier, we will,
but, generally, this time of the year, what we can get supplied.
So, what are we putting in there now?
We're going to put six bags of frozen onions in. Go on.
I dropped a couple.
I'm not bad at dicing onions, but 20 kilos?
That's five. One more, please.
There's no real onion smell. No. With them being frozen,
it tends to keep down the smell and they don't make you cry.
I'm really pleased about that. Right, now what, chef?
We need 14 bags of frozen peas.
This is hard work.
My hands are freezing. Agh!
GREGG LAUGHS
Are you keeping count?
I thought you was doing that. Yeah. One more.
Now we've got the fresh swedes. How many swedes?
Ten. Ten. That's like two and a half Abbas, isn't it?
# Super trouper Beams are gonna blind me
# But I won't feel blue... #
A lot of vegetables there, Ian.
We're going to sweat these all down, though, in a massive saucepan
with a bit of butter. IAN LAUGHS
We've still got the haricot beans to go in next.
Agh. They're just naked baked beans.
That's right, yes.
Already been blanched. All right. How many in there?
There's 41 kilos of haricot beans.
# Like a super trouper... #
The factory developed this soup recipe in 1930
and it's barely changed since then.
# Smiling, having fun... #
So, what happens to this lot now?
We're going to start cooking it.
We're following our nearly one tonne of chopped veg
to the cooking area.
That's a fine looking thing. Isn't it?
There's your five a day right there.
This containerful is just for our batch of veggie soup -
one of 70 they're making today.
Shut that gate for me and press the close button.
How dangerous are those peas if they have to be kept behind a cage?
Wahey, there it goes.
Where's that veg going now?
Down a shoot to a big pressure cooker beneath our feet.
It's 466 times bigger than the one I have at home.
We're just softening it and pre-cooking it.
So, how are you doing that?
We do that with very hot water and a mixture of steam.
Boiling up soup ingredients in a pressure cooker is a new one on me.
I always saute, or brown the veg and then add liquid,
but this is the most efficient way to cope with such large quantities.
Is that it, then? No, we need another addition of veg,
which is potatoes, and some pasta as well.
Why do they go in last?
If they went in too early, it would just turn into a mush.
Well, come on, then. OK.
There's people at home waiting for their soups.
The veg is in for 12 minutes before we add 350 kilos
of dried pasta and diced potatoes.
Then cornflour goes in to thicken the mix
and four hours 37 minutes after we started production,
the whole mix is pre-cooked.
Here we've got most of a batch.
Well, that's a lovely mix of veg. That's our garnish.
You call this garnish? That's right. No, no, no, no, no.
Mate, garnish is a wedge of lemon,
or a sprig of parsley?
That's the heart of your soup.
Yeah, but that's what we call our garnish.
But that is really, really thick.
So that obviously doesn't go out like that.
So what happens to that now?
We've got to add the sauce to that.
This is very, very different to making a vegetable soup at home.
They're keeping their veggies separate from their stock or sauce,
which naturally we're making in a special sauce-pan.
One of eight they have in the kitchen.
They're so big, they go all the way through to the floor below.
So, what goes in it?
These are our spices and extract. What are they?
If I knew, I couldn't tell you.
Is it a secret? It is a secret, yeah.
There's obviously pepper in there. There must be salt in there.
And I think there might be cumin in there.
And there is a sweet, pickley smell,
like you get at an Indian restaurant.
Anyway, it's quite a powerful mix.
Whoa!
I normally only put a couple of teaspoons in mine.
We're tipping in three boxes of herbs and flavouring.
That is industrial-scale seasoning.
And that's only the start of the sauce.
We get a mixture of water, flour and tomato pulp coming in next.
152 gallons of tomato pulp are mixed with 300 gallons of water,
along with sugar and yeast extract.
I can see tomato going in there.
I can smell it as well - it's really fruity.
The factory has bred its very own variety of tomatoes,
which they develop for firmness and flavour.
The level's rising. Agh.
Close that now before we decorate the place.
GREGG LAUGHS
I liked that. It was like a load of glowing red molten lava.
Yeah. Only closer to the surface.
Ian, my friend, thank you very much for your time. You're welcome.
Thank you.
I'm leaving this tomato sauce to be heated to 91 degrees
to fully develop its flavour.
Like our soup, pretty much every dish we make at home
is improved with a pinch of salt.
Cherry's searching for its source in Cheshire.
I've been given directions to Britain's largest rock salt reserves
at a secret location north of Crewe.
Don't know if I'm in the right place - there's no mine shafts.
There's no diggers, there's no mining drills,
just a bunch of sheep.
But I do spy Joe Evans from British Salt.
Hi, Joe. Hi, Cherry. Nice to meet you.
Um, where's the mine?
Well, believe it or not, Cherry, more than half of the salt used