The cereal bar. This portable snack has been refuelling us for decades.
We unwrap over 15 million of them every week.
Powering an industry worth over £300 million a year.
Whether it's oat-, rice- or wheat-packed,
the choice is staggering.
You know what, Greg?
I absolutely love a dried fruit and nut combo.
In that case, Cherry, you are going to go nuts
for the bars they make in this factory.
Coming through!
I'm Gregg Wallace.
You can smell that toastiness.
And tonight, I'm discovering the delicate balancing act
at the heart of each bar.
You can pour wet things over a crispy thing and it stays crispy?
Yep, it does indeed.
You're like a cookery magician. We are, yes.
GREGG CHUCKLES
CHERRY SCREAMS
That is fun.
I'm Cherry Healey.
And I'll be following the astonishing journey
these nuts go on from tree...
Oh, wow! They look like tiny limes.
..to bar.
Those nuts like to party.
And historian Ruth Goodman...
It's really simple, isn't it? Quite basic, yes, yes.
..is on the road,
discovering the groovy origins of these handy snacks.
It was sort of the staple food of all hippies in those days.
Over the next 24 hours,
this factory will transform 18 tonnes of fruit and nuts...
..into 400,000 cereal bars.
Welcome to Inside The Factory.
This the Eat Natural factory at Halstead, Essex.
300 people work here,
knocking out more than 90 million cereal bars every year.
They make 22 different types.
From protein-packed salted caramel and peanuts...
..to almond and apricot.
Tonight, we're following production of one of their best-selling bars -
dark chocolate with cranberries and macadamias.
Packed with nuts, cranberries, coconut, sultanas
and coated in chocolate.
Producing these bars on a monster scale
is a complex and challenging process,
which begins at the intake area.
where I'm receiving a month's supply
of one of our most important ingredients, macadamias,
with quality inspector and all-round nut expert, Richard Lansdown.
Is that it? Yep, that's it.
Sorry, I don't mean to sound rude,
but I'm used to dirty, great big trucks full of stuff.
So how many nuts on there?
We've got 2,000 kilos of macadamia nuts.
How long will that last you?
There's enough to make a million bars there.
Oh, really? Yeah.
That's an important delivery for you guys, then?
I guess it is. Let's get it unloaded.
Macadamias are one of the priciest nuts in the world,
and the most expensive ingredient in our bar.
They're...they're chopped?
This allows us to evenly distribute them in the bars.
If they were bigger, they really wouldn't fit in.
Why would you use macadamias as opposed to a hazelnut or a walnut?
Well, they have a unique, mild, mellow,
sort of faintly buttery flavour.
Texture is crisp but soft, so it's absolutely perfect for our product.
While these guys crack on unloading this lot,
Cherry's exploring the challenges
of getting these nuts from far-flung field to factory.
I've come to the lush, mountainous region of Mpumalanga
in northern South Africa,
which provides the perfect climate for our factory's macadamias.
South Africa is the largest producer of macadamia nuts in the world,
accounting for over a quarter of the global harvest.
Terry Haig is the farm manager at Green Farms,
where they grow 100 tonnes a year on 48,000 trees.
Hi, Terry, lovely to meet you. Nice to meet you, Cherry.
So this is a macadamia nut tree? Yeah.
Can I see some? I've never really seen a nut on a tree.
There's some here.
Oh, wow! They look like tiny limes.
So this is the outer husk, and you can bite that off.
You can bite it off?
Oh, look at that.
But that's not macadamia nut?
No, the kernel is inside the shell.
So inside there is the actual nut that we're after? Yeah.
Can I crack open?
You could try.
Holy Moley.
Argh, God. That's unbelievably tough.
It is the toughest nut shell... ..in the world? Yeah, yeah.
One reason this nut is so pricey
is it can take seven years for the trees to mature
and produce their first commercial crop.
Harvesting and processing is a labour-intensive process.
How do you harvest a macadamia nut? Do you pick it off a tree?
Well, this particular variety drops their nuts when they are mature.
The tree will let you know when it's time to harvest?
That's right, yeah.
I'm joining one of the farm's pickers, Julianne Makuena...
Nice to meet you.
..to lend a hand.
I'm very strong.
I feel like I'm going to be useful on your team. OK.
OK?
Show me how to do it.
Make it low for you.
We make the sacks like this. OK.
So then starting harvesting. OK.
Oh, you are fast. Oh, you're fast! I see, I see.
So quick. Yeah. Yeah.
How many bags can you collect in one day?
Maybe 12 or 15.
Bags filled, time for their weigh-in.
I'm a bit nervous about this. Yeah.
How much was your bag?
12.54. 12.54 kg? Yes.
I'm not sure I can match that.
I'm sweating so much, and it's seven kilograms.
We empty our haul into a waiting trailer.
One, two, three. One, two, three. Argh, go on!
Then our tough nuts begin a hardcore workout.
Their soft, green outer husks are stripped off,
and the nuts are tipped into a giant hopper.
Go! SHE SCREAMS
Whoa! That is fun!
That is a lot of nuts.
Protected by their hard shells,
they take a roller-coaster ride into vast dryers.
The heat makes the kernels inside shrink away from their shells,
making it easier to crack through that armour-plating.
In the enormous nut-cracking room,
Alex White's telling me how they do it.
How do you crack the world's toughest nut?
With special-designed macadamia nut crackers.
So it just smashes the nut, basically,
and hopefully the kernel comes out whole.
Oh, wow! Just like that. Oh, and there it is. Yeah.
Rotating steel rollers press together with 300 psi of pressure.
It's like a baby elephant sitting on each nut.
This smashes the shells open,
releasing the valuable kernels inside.
Wow!
Those nuts like to party.
LIVELY MUSIC PLAYS
They head across a set of shaking sieves.
Bits of shell and smaller nuts fall through the holes,
and the bigger nuts head on for a visual check.
Once given the final OK, they're vacuum sealed into foil bags
and packed into cardboard boxes.
The half a million macadamia nuts on this pallet
are now ready to go to the cereal bar factory in Essex.
I'm not carrying them all the way.
Fortunately for Cherry,
the nuts are driven nine hours to the port of Durban...
..where they're loaded onto a container ship,
which carries them round the Cape of Good Hope
on a 22-day voyage direct to the port of Felixstowe.
Once they hit dry land, it's an hour's trip
to our cereal bar factory.
And 20 minutes after our nuts arrived,
they make a 300 metre hop across the site to ingredients preparation...
..where technical manager Lisa Conning
is checking they make the grade
before they head into our cereal bars.
Lisa? Yes. All right? Hi.
How many nuts are we dealing with here?
So we're going to deal with about 260kg per hour.
That's a fair amount of nut, innit? Yeah.
That's 260,000 nuts.
I know how to check to see if an elephant's been in the bag.
There wouldn't be any nuts left.
Yes, true!
MUSIC: Let's Go Surfing by The Drums
They may have travelled 8,500 miles,
but these nuts still have a long way to go
to prove they're exactly right for our cereal bars.
To pass muster, each individual nut needs to be
exactly ten millimetres wide and perfectly creamy coloured.
They queue up for inspection on a series of conveyors
and drop onto a four-metre-long vibrating tray
which separates them out,
before bouncing towards a highly complex bit of machinery.
Right, what am I looking at, a load of nuts coming down a slide?
Yeah, so this is our laser sorter.
The laser acts as the eyes.
There's electronics in there that acts like a human brain,
to push off any nuts that we don't want.
And you say it acts like a human brain? Yeah.
It doesn't want to act like my brain.
It'll just be telling rubbish jokes all day long.
What is it discarding?
So this'll get rid of any darker nuts that we don't want.
This sorter has a clever way of picking out
any nuts which fall short of the standard.
There's 64 air jets in there that will ping them off.
It's shooting them off? Yes.
The nuts drop off the edge of the vibrating shelf into the sorter.
They fall past four lasers fired between two rotating drums.
The lasers check every single nut
against these specially coloured drums.
If they don't precisely match the pre-set colour...
..a series of air jets fire them into a reject bin.
But it's not the end of the road for these little fellas.
They're sent to a specialist plant,
where they're broken down to generate electricity.
The super nuts that have passed their test
continue through the machine.
As fast as I can see the nuts falling,
that's as fast as it can shoot them off?
Yes, because actually it can scan up to 2,000 nuts per second.
Say that again.
Yeah, 2,000 nuts per second, it's incredible.
I love this stuff, I love this stuff.
So does this just do nuts?
It looks at nuts but it could also look at other raw materials,
like our sultanas and apricots.
So how does that work?
How does the computer know when you've changed it?
What we have is different coloured drums for different products.
So, right now, that's a macadamia nut coloured drum? Yeah.
For other bars, there's also dark brown for almonds,
green for pumpkin seeds, and white for cashews.
What are these people here doing?
So, even though we've got our amazing machine,
that is 90% efficient and we still need members of our team
to pull off the other 10%.
So they're just doing a final visual check,
because a single nut that's not right could affect our product.
So as clever as that machine thinks it is, we still need humans? Yes.
Checks complete, the nuts tumble into a 350 kilo hopper
at the end of the line.
Now it's time to turn up the heat.
Can I help?
Course you can, you can go up those stairs and open the gates, please.
I feed the nuts into a giant four-metre gas-fired oven.
That is a torrent of nuts.
They pass under an adjustable bar,
set to an exact 2.5 centimetres.
This flattens them down, so each nut gets a perfect roasting.
Why do you roast them?
Why don't you just put them into the bar as they are?
Because we want to make it even tastier
by bringing out those lovely sweet flavours.
Just 15 minutes at 135 degrees Celsius
before they pop out the other end.
You can smell that toastiness.
What is actually happening to the nuts when you're toasting them?
There's the chemical reaction called the Maillard reaction
when there's heat being applied.
And that is just the reaction between the sugars and the proteins,
which gives the nut the final, gentle browning
and this lovely flavour.
I can feel a draught.
It cools at the end of the roasting
by blowing off all the heat.
Why-why do you want to cool them?
We want to make sure that we don't get any horrible sweaty nuts
which will affect the quality of the bar.
Yeah, I'm saying nothing.
Roasted and ready, they're packed into to 12.5 kilo boxes.
Our nuts are prepped and well on their way
to becoming part of our cereal bars.
But whose idea was it to turn a bowl of cereal into...
..well, into a bar?
Ruth is investigating in Bedfordshire.
It may surprise you to learn that it was not either the oatcake
or the flapjack that kick-started cereal bars in Britain.
To find out what did, we have to take a trip back in time...
RECORD SCRATCH
..to 1969...
MUSIC: Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix
..and the heyday of hippies...
..when a 20-year-old drummer from England called Bill Jordan
was touring the west coast of California with his blues rock band.
# Excuse me, while I kiss the sky. #
Once he was out there, he started experimenting with something
that all the hippies were doing.
Not drugs, but an oaty cereal called granola.
50 years down the road, Bill still remembers the breakfast
that changed his life, and our eating habits.
So what did you think of this stuff when you first ate it?
Well, I mean, if you're used to sort of normal breakfast cereals,
this was amazing, it was whole grains,
it was a different texture, a lot of different flavours,
a lot of different ingredients, it was very different stuff.
A mix of whole oats, nuts and seeds, granola was baked hard with honey.
It was sort of the staple food of all hippies in those days.
Young Bill was convinced there was a market for granola in Britain.
After his year living the rock and roll dream,
he returned home to Bedfordshire...
..and the mill where his family had been producing white flour
for 70 years.
What a fabulous place!
Yeah, lovely old mill, isn't it?
So this is what you were coming back to?
That's right. It's been here since 1899, this mill.
And you brought back the granola here, then. Yeah.
At, what, 20 years of age?
Yeah, we just thought it was a good idea.
Liked the stuff, we got a bit of abuse from the family.
They sort of said, you know, "Whole grains?"
Dad said he couldn't even sell it to animals,
and he didn't fancy our chances selling it to humans.
The family's Victorian watermill was struggling to compete
with new-fangled electric-powered flour mills.
But Bill knew the older technology was perfect
for slow rolling the wholegrain cereals needed in the granola.
His sister, Lindsay, got in on the act.
Well, we weren't really that keen to start with.
We always looked at it, looked a bit strange,
but once we started giving people it to try,
then they loved it, tastes delicious.
They came up with a unique mobile marketing approach.
As you can see, it was called Original Crunchy G.
We started off and did the first three Glastonburys.
So you were sort of on tour, really?
Sounds much better than it was, but, yeah, we were on tour.
RUTH LAUGHS
And, after that, we took the show to the county shows.
I mean, that would be memorable, if you turned up at a county show.
I mean, look at you all!
It was a while ago!
THEY LAUGH
It's a real '70s, new... Hippies.
Hippies, yeah. We were all hippies.
As well as at festivals, their new Jordan's brand of granola
proved popular in 1970s health food shops,
and soon they branched out into an entirely new product.
So how on earth did you move
from making granola to making cereal bars?
We got a lot of distressed people writing,
saying they liked eating granola in the car
and it got behind the seat or down their trousers or whatever.
So what on earth did you do?
Ah. That's the difficult bit. We tried for a lot of time,
but the job is to try and get granola
in a sort of form where there's...
Well, as you can sort of tell from this.
You've got the sort of fruit and the nuts,
but it holds together.
This was the UK's first cereal bar, and it launched in 1981...
MUSIC: Just Can't Get Enough by Depeche Mode
..ready to ride a wave of '80s consumerism...
# When I'm with you, baby
# I go out of my head... #
..and a health and fitness boom.
The market just went crazy and it took us something like -
ooh, crikey - six months to do the first million bars.
Wow! And the market grew so fast, you know, two years later
we were doing three million bars a week.
That is really fast! Yeah, yeah.
JAWS-LIKE MUSIC
CRUNCH!
With such rapid growth,
it wasn't long before others joined the party.
CRUNCH!
In 1982, Quaker warned us to watch out for squirrels
if you ate their bars.
ECHOING: Tracker... Tracker... Tracker... Tracker...
And in 1987, confectioner Mars used an association
with the great outdoors to promote their version.
Today, the global cereal bar market is worth over £10 billion.
But here in Britain, we may not have taken them to heart
if it had not been for a miller's son touring West Coast America
in the psychedelic '60s.
We're 48 minutes into the production process
and the macadamia nuts for our cereal bars
have been sorted, roasted and boxed.
OK. Come on, then.
Lisa and I are carrying them to the mixing area,
where the building blocks of our cereal bars come together.
What are we doing with these?
So we're going to decant them on to here. Decant them? Yes.
Is there a special technique? Tip them out.
Hey!
The ingredients will be combined in five metal trollies
to make it easier to process further down the line.
Beautiful! Ooh, they're still warm!
First up is 30 kilos of macadamias.
Is there a reason why you don't just tip it straight into the bin?
Yes. We like to also do another check,
just to make sure that they're exactly what we want.
GREGG CHUCKLES
This is great!
Macadamias will make up 6% of our finished bar,
along with macadamia powder from the same suppliers.
Whoa!
I'm just like a kid in an edible sandpit.
These powdered nuts help to glue the other ingredients together,
making sure there are no big gaps in the finished bars.
How many sultanas do we need?
We need nine boxes, which is 120 kilos.
These will form 16% of our bars.
Raisin' the bar here, ain't we?
Now 64kg of pre-weighed dried cranberries join the party...
Whoa!
..to add colour and sharp, sweet flavour.
Hai-yah!
Oof! LISA LAUGHS
It's a real beauty
to have all these products just out on a bench in front of you.
Look at the vivid colour. It's lovely.
Last of all, coconut, which makes up a fifth of the bar.
Why do we need coconut?
Cos it gives a lovely, oily quality to our bar.
The fragrance is unbelievable.
That is floating away on a sea of coconut essence. Yeah.
That is beautiful.
I've never been in a factory like this.
Everything is done by hand.
It just allows us to make sure that, at every stage,
we can make sure that the ingredients are right.
Don't ever get a machine for this bit, OK? No.
This has been my most enjoyable process in any factory.
I've now got five containers of nearly 400kg of ingredients,
so I'm letting a machine take the strain from here.
Shall I? Yeah.
LISA LAUGHS Ahem! What are you laughing at?
That's not very encouraging, is it, laughing?
Do you laugh at all your trainees like that? Yes!
I'll go to the HR department if you laugh at me again.
That's it! Perfect.
With the push of a button, a hydraulic lift
tips our bins of dry mix into this giant 900-litre mixer.
Oh, look at that.
HE LAUGHS
Oh, I'm enjoying this.
The mixer gently combines them,
but I can't help thinking there's something missing.
Right. Are we now adding some cereal to it?
That's going to come in a bit, when we go to the production line.
Are you sure there is cereal in your cereal bar? Yeah, I'm sure.
You've seen the recipe, have you? Yes!
I'll have to take Lisa's word for it.
Our cereal-less cereal bar mix travels along a series of conveyors
and is sealed into boxes...
..each one holding enough to make up 480 bars.
The sultanas we've added to our mix
play a very important role in our cereal bars,
adding both texture and sweetness.
Cherry's back in South Africa,
learning just what makes a sultana a sultana.
I'm in the vineyards of Upington in the Northern Cape Province,
where it's harvest time.
I've often wondered what the difference is
between a raisin and a sultana.
I'm hoping Pieter Roos from Carpe Diem can come to my aid.
Hi, Pieter. Lovely to meet you.
Hi, Cherry. Nice to meet you. What a gorgeous bunch of grapes.
Those are absolutely amazing.
They're so juicy.
This variety is the Thompson seedless,
also known as the sultana grape.
Do you just leave these grapes on the vine
and they'll dry and - boom! - you'll have a sultana?
No, actually, if you leave them on the vines, you get a raisin.
You get a raisin? A raisin.
But with the same grapes, you can actually make sultanas.
All my life, I've believed that sultanas come from white grapes
and raisins come from red grapes.
And that's not true at all. No, it's not.
Sultanas and raisins both start life as white grapes.
It's the way they're treated
that determines which dried fruit they become.
So how do you make a sultana?
You spray it with a mixture.
We've got a mixture here so I can show you.
On this farm, when the grapes are ripe in March,
they spray them with a solution of water, vegetable oil
and a baking powder-like ingredient called potassium carbonate.
How does it turn these grapes into sultanas?
The potassium will actually damage the skin, forming cracks on the skin
to get the moisture evaporating quicker
and turning it to a golden brown sultana.
The sprayed bunches of grapes are cut off the vines
and, just like washing, they're hung out on a line to dry.
They lose 80% of their moisture, which makes them sweeter,
and shrinks them by a quarter.
Just four weeks later, they're finished sultanas.
But in the field next door, Pieter's crop looks very different.
OK. So this is the raisins.
So these haven't been sprayed. No.
How do you start the drying process?
So, for raisins, you wait a little bit longer
to get the sugar content a little bit higher.
These grapes are left on the plant for two weeks longer,
so they're riper before they're cut.
They're not sprayed, but allowed to dry naturally in the sun.
They're left for six weeks, making them darker
and more caramelly than sultanas.
Is that like when you leave something in the oven,
the longer you leave it, the darker and crispier it becomes?
Exactly.
Both crops are harvested and processed in the same way,
simply washed, dried and packed, ready to be sent all over the world.
Oh, there's a reason to be happy!
Those are some beautiful raisins. Wow.
You can really tell the difference. You see the difference.
You really can. So the sultana is a lovely golden brown,
whereas the raisins are a really deep, intense brown.
Shall we have a taste test? Yes. OK.
So sultanas first?
Kind of a zing to it. It's quite citrussy. Now a raisin.
I think it's much more intense, much richer. Smoother.
Smoother. And sweeter. Very sweet.
It's amazing how much difference it makes. Yeah.
So that intensity is really striking.
So now you've unfolded the mystery of sultana versus raisin.
I have one more for you.
What is a currant?
Does that come from the same grape?
Do you just leave it on there for 1,000 years?
THEY CHUCKLE
No, currants is a totally different grape, mainly from Greece.
So this is a different grape. Yes, yes. OK.
It's a red grape called a Black Corinth.
It's much less sweet, much less intense. Yeah.
I imagine that's why it's mainly used for cooking,
for currant buns. Bakeries. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, whichever one you prefer,
any RAISIN for a snack.
Cheers. Cheers to that.
Back in Essex, our sultanas and other dried fruit and nuts
are ready to roll.
With no time to waste,
they take a quick forklift ride over to the production area.
This is the heart of our factory, where all the ingredients
will finally be transformed into cereal bars.
In charge of this precise operation
is production manager Leanne Taylor.
Leanne. How are you doing?
I'm good. How are you? Happy. Good. Right.
This is my batch. Right? Or your batch. Our batch. Our batch.
But we do need to add one final ingredient to it first.
Cereal? Cereal.
You're finally putting cereal in your cereal bar? We are indeed.
Yes.
I was beginning to wonder whether it was ever going to happen.
What is the cereal?
The cereal that we're going to add is puffed rice.
Is that the same puffed rice that we get in breakfast cereals?
Pretty much.
Puffed rice is made by mixing rice flour with water and sugar.
It's then moulded into rice-shaped pieces,
dried, and toasted till crispy.
That has got a sweet...
..breakfast cereal smell, hasn't it?
It has. Cor! I want to get a spoon and a bowl of milk!
Why puffed rice?
So we use the puffed rice to add some texture to the bar,
and it also keeps the bar quite light.
The fruit and nut mix that you've made is quite heavy.
So the puffed rice actually balances out and keeps it nice and light.
The rice makes up 9% of our bar,
and I need 6.2 kilos of these airy grains.
About a third of a kilo each shovel.
You got a bigger shovel, love?
You're just slow.
I'm one of the quickest rice shovellers in the business.
YES!
6.2 kilos on the nose.
The dry ingredients for our cereal bars have come together.
Where's it going, boss? Mixing area.
Coming through! Stand by, mixing area!
Round the corner.
Into the hoist.
Excellent.
Here we go.
The 14 paddles on this magic mixer turn at 40 revs per minute,
slowly mixing the ingredients together,
just like you would at home with a wooden spoon.
But I can't yet see how all these yummy stuff
is going to stick together.
That isn't bound at all. No.
So there's one more ingredient that you need to go and get. Where?
Over there. And bring it back?
Yep. I'll see you in a bit.
To track down my missing ingredient,
I'm meeting Harriet Gregory.
Harriet? Hello.
Is that what's going to bind my bars? Yes.
This is our lovely honey mix.
So we've got a mixture of two honeys, a dark honey
and a light honey, which is a little bit more acidic,
slightly spicy, maybe.
That really is quite sharp. Yeah.
What did the bees go? A lemon tree?
And then try the darker one.
That is thick and luxurious.
And almost like a like a chocolate bar. But quite strong.
So I think you need the two, just to level things out a little bit.
I don't know whether people realise that, actually, different honey
comes from different flowers, different pollen.
It's wherever the bees go. Right?
Exactly. So this one is where they've been having
really scented flowers.
And this one is where they've been in woodlands and forest.
The honeys taste great to me.
But, surprisingly, Harriet's mix
also contains two-thirds liquid glucose.
Why have we got to add glucose?
Because it helps form a crystal structure within the bar.
And so when you bite into the bar, that lovely crunch that you have
is caused by the crystals of the glucose.
Without the glucose,
you just end up with something that will fall apart.
They'd just have a bit of a mild chew?
To be honest, it would be quite soggy.
Why not just make it from glucose?
The bar would literally be so hard,
it would almost break like glass and you wouldn't want to eat it.
So different honeys give it flavour. Yeah.
They also give the bar a certain softness. Exactly.
The glucose actually dilutes the honey flavour,
which is a bit too strong. A little bit, yeah.
And also helps the bars stick together.
Exactly. You've got it.
Oh-ho!
This honey mix will make up about a fifth of my bar.
And I need a whole bucketful,
heated to 80 degrees Celsius so it's runny honey.
I'm happier than Winnie the Pooh.
Do you know what I want to do with that now?
What do you want to do? I want a bath in it.
Oh, look at that. Ha-ha!
30 seconds of gentle mixing sweetens this lot up nicely.
I don't believe that's going to stick together.
Come and have a look at this. Does that look right to you?
Oh, it looks perfect. Really? Yeah.
Don't these crispy bits of rice now get soggy?
No. They actually work really well to help make it nice and crisp.
You can pour wet things over a crispy thing and it stays crispy?
Yep. It does. You're like a cookery magician.
We are, yes.
Take it away? Take it away.
I'm telling you, that's not sticky enough. We'll see.
An hour and 40 minutes in,
and with 55 kilos of mix to now turn into 1,440 cereal bars,
it's all hands on deck, quite literally.
The sticky mixture is weighed into 920-gram portions.
What are they doing?
We are now putting our mix into the baking trays.
1,440 bars... Yeah.
..is baked in little things that would fit in your oven at home?
Yes.
And just like at home, each steel tray is lined with greaseproof paper
to stop it sticking.
Is this just for me, cos I'm here? Or is this actually how you make...?
This is how we make every single bar.
By hand? By hand.
What's this gentleman here doing? He's doing what we call massage.
Yes. He's massaging the product to make it nice and even,
so that we don't get holes or gaps in the bars.
We need to make sure it's in the corners of the baking tray.
Are you a good fruit and nut bar massager?
I am good, but not as good as these guys.
Feel free to have a go.
Yeah.
Now, I love a good massage,
but I'm normally on the receiving end.
How hard can it be?
Don't push it down, Gregg.
You want to massage it, not compact it.
Ah! Don't push it down.
Spread it out.
Being careful not to crush the ingredients
is a delicate business.
Sorry.
That took me 20 seconds to do one,
and there's 60 to do!
Gregg, you've only got 20 minutes to do this. You're getting behind.
Hard work, this is.
Next up is pinning, named after the rolling pin,
which gently flattens the mix to 1.5 centimetres -
the exact depth of the tray.
Can I have a go at pinning, now? Pinning looks easier.
Yep.
Oh, this is an easy job!
Easy job!
Oh, whoa! Whoa!
There we go, look.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
That can't go on. Why? What's wrong with it?
Look how wavy your bar is. Feel it.
If not rolled out flat, our bars won't bake evenly.
Look at that.
How's that? Perfect.
Where do they go then? They need to be loaded into the trolley.
180 trays an hour are loaded onto these movable racks.
My 60 trays take up a whole trolley.
You get there eventually, don't you?
I mean, look, I'm actually... Can I tell you something?
I'm actually quite proud of myself.
You should be, that's really, really good.
A-ha-ha!
Next stop is the baking area.
MUSIC: Spinning Around by Kylie Minogue
We wheel our trays, trolley and all,
straight into a 2.5 metre high walk-in oven
with a special design feature.
It's turning round!
# I'm spinning around
# Move out of my way
# I know you're feeling me Cos you like it like this. #
Why's it turning round?
So we can get a nice, even distribution of heat
through the trolley and all of the trays.
The trolleys sit on a turntable built into the floor of the oven,
which spins them a sedate two revolutions per minute.
Some ovens, all ovens - even ovens at home - have got hot spots,
which is why sometimes the corner of your pie's burnt.
Yeah, so there'll be no burnt edges on this,
because it's rotating constantly.
It's getting a nice, even bake in there.
I like it here.
This great bit of kit edges the temperature
up to 180 degrees Celsius.
The heat reduces the moisture in the bars,
concentrating the sugars in the honey mix,
changing the crystal structure,
which helps bind our ingredients together to make solid bars.
After their 17-minute spin class, they're nice and warm.
Whoa! Careful!
Something hot in the kitchen.
And he's carrying some bars!
Time for them to chill out.
Really? Yep.
You just stick it in front of a wall of fans? Yes.
And that's it?
But these are no ordinary fans.
These six industrial beasts
turn at an impressive 1,330 revs per minute.
Whoa, it's...!
Whoosh! LEANNE LAUGHS
Whoosh!
That was great.
It will take just ten minutes for our trays to cool down
from 75 degrees Celsius to room temperature.
Of course, cereal bars are just one way of keeping us fuelled on the go.
Ruth has been delving into the history
of one of the original energy bars.
I've come to the wild moors and rolling hills
of the Lake District.
A hiker's paradise and home to Kendal Mint Cake -
super-sugary, super-minty.
Why is it so synonymous with mountaineering and explorers?
To find out, I'm meeting Mollie Hughes...
Hello!
..who researched the history of this sugary snack
while preparing for her successful ascent of Everest.
On top of the world!
So what's so good about Kendal Mint Cake, then?
So, Kendal Mint Cake has all these compact sugars.
Really high energy and, especially on Everest and at high altitude,
your body finds it hard to digest food,
so these kind of simple sugars are really great.
And I guess I know from my own expeditions,
you burn so many calories -
like, between maybe 6,000 and 7,000 calories a day...
Wow! ..as you're heading to the summit. Crazy amounts.
So this kind of thing,
this high-energy, easy-to-eat food is great.
It doesn't freeze in low temperatures.
It doesn't even melt in the sun.
So it's really great for these high-altitude expeditions.
Kendal Mint Cake was invented in 1869,
in the town that gives it its name, by confectioner Joseph Wiper.
I'm going to Romney's - one of the top producers of the bar -
where managing director John Barron...
John, hi! Hello, Ruth. Hey. Pleased to meet you.
..is letting me in on the secrets of this sweet treat.
What's in Kendal Mint Cake?
Basically, sugar. Sugar with glucose and water
and then we add peppermint oil, obviously,
to get the mint flavour, yeah.
That's really simple, isn't it? Quite basic, yes, yes.
Basic it may be...
OK, so we'll get this poured out.
..but this sugary bar is the success story that nearly never was.
How Kendal Mint Cake came about -
somebody was actually trying to make a clear mint.
And what they've done is they've taken the boiling off too early,
and then stirred it and it went cloudy and they poured it out
and thought, "Oh, dear, this is no good."
But, when it set, thought, "Hey, we've got something here."
The cloudy mixture is ladled into moulds.
I'll make sure it goes to the corners. There you go.
So nice and liquid. That's it. Self-levelling.
After just ten minutes, the solid cake is turned out
and broken into bar-sized pieces, and wrapped.
Although the first bars were sold locally to Victorian tourists,
they quickly established a reputation
as the explorer's energy snack of choice
when, in 1914, Ernest Shackleton
took mint cake with him to Antarctica.
But one event cemented its place in mountaineering history.
So Kendal Mint Cake's most famous moment came at 11:30am
on the 29th of May, 1953.
And this was when Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay,
they reached the summit of Mount Everest.
This was the first time anyone had succeeded
in reaching the highest peak in the world.
So Tenzing Norgay is quoted on the packet.
He says, "We sat down in the snow
"and looked out at the country far below us.
"We nibbled the Kendal Mint Cake."
So how much Kendal Mint Cake did Sir Edmund Hillary take?
I've actually got the original order here with us.
It says, "We would like to incorporate it
"in our special high-altitude rations.
"We will require 300 such bars."
This was a big ask.
Sugar was still in short supply after Second World War rationing
had restricted distribution.
But it made all the difference to them,
and to the popularity of mint cake.
So we know that Edmund Hillary had quite a large stock.
We know that they were eating it on the summit.
And then that information is part of the advertising and marketing
for Kendal Mint Cake for years.
Yep, absolutely. I think any mountaineer and hiker in the UK
knows Kendal Mint Cake and has eaten it
at one point or another on a mountain.
This is the original British energy bar.
And 150 years after it was first invented in the Lake District,
it still provides a high-energy boost to hikers all across Britain.
In the flatlands of Essex,
our chilled-out trays of baked cereal mix
are ready for the next leg of their journey.
Right.
I am as chilled as the bars. Yes, you are.
What are we going to do? So now we need to cut the baking tray.
So this is the point our bars really start to look like bars.
Fantastic.
Yeah. At last. At last.
Is this the cutting machine? It is, yes. Right.
Can I do it? Yeah, you can. So take a baking tray out.
That was complicated, wasn't it?
Very technical.
Slide it underneath.
Both hands on the thing. Do I have to slam it?
No. Just bring it down nice and gently.
With this fancy cutter,
the factory can chop 360 trays an hour.
Behind the safety guard,
a dozen blades apply 12 tonnes per square inch of pressure
to the mix, cutting it into 24 tidy bars.
There they are. There they are.
All packed full of nuts, bar none.
Exactly. I've got other 59 trays to cut, right? You have,
and you've got ten minutes to do that
and that'll be our 1,440 bars.
My bars are nearly complete,
but they're looking a bit underdressed.
Tipped out from their trays, they're lined up like soldiers -
nine across - on a conveyor belt.
Again, by hand? Again by hand. Are they ready now?
Are they ready to get wrapped up and gone?
No, we've got one final ingredient to add -
a little bit of indulgence.
It's the chocolate, innit? It's the chocolate.
So I need you to go and get me some chocolate.
No way! Yeah. A bucket of chocolate?! A bucket of chocolate.
I might be a while. No, you won't, cos I'm coming with you.
The dark chocolate which will coat our bars
arrives at the factory in giant button form
and is melted to 45 degrees Celsius
in huge 2,000-litre tanks.
13 kilos is just enough for our batch.
I got to taste the honey.
Do I get to taste the chocolate? No.
But maybe later on a bar.
Sorry. Come on, let's go.
Whoa-ho-ho!
Ho-ho-ho!
It's 3 hours, 42 minutes since
our macadamia nuts arrived at the factory
and it's time for our bars to have their finishing touch.
Some jobs you do that are an absolute delight.
Yeah.
My melted chocolate pours straight into a small tray
on this enrobing machine.
That'll do lovely.
Yeah? Yeah.
Look at that. Oh. Clean. You kept your hands clean, too.
Well done.
It's pumped into a heated reservoir
and a series of rollers feed it up towards a wire conveyor.
As the bars march across this melty chocolate sea,
the rollers push the chocolate up through the wire conveyor,
coating my battalion with nine grams of the lovely stuff.
It takes just six minutes to have their chocolaty bath.
But they need to cool off quickly before they're wrapped up.
They've got chocolate on the bottom. Where are they going now?
What's this? So this is a cooling tunnel. Ah. Yeah.
So is this just one big refrigerator?
Pretty much, yes.
That bottom cooling - which is where the chocolate is -
will be around five degrees.
And we've a top cooling, which is around eight degrees.
So what's it for - just to set the chocolate?
Just to set the chocolate. Yeah.
In their final push,
my troops are paraded through this 18-metre fan-cooled tunnel.
3 hours and 48 minutes since our nuts arrived at the factory,
my bars are complete.
That's it, right? That's it.
That's our finished bar. It is, yes.
Honey mix, dried fruit, toasted nuts and a bit of chocolate.
Perfect. And I've had a hand in every single little bit.
Nice little bar, that. It is, yeah.
While they form an orderly queue for the next stage,
Cherry's delving into the secrets of the nuts
at the heart of them down in Cornwall.
I've come to this balmy biome to unravel a botanical puzzle.
Because it's harder to spot a nut than you might think.
And, to kick things off, I've got a cracking game for the visitors
at the Eden Project. It's called Nut Or No Nut.
Hazelnut.
Cashew nut.
And peanut.
The rules are simple - is it a nut or not?
All three are nuts. Really?
Really. You sure? Quite sure.
I know that's a nut. Yes.
Cos I grow them at home.
Nut. Nut? Don't want to phone a friend?
No, no, I'm convinced all three are nuts.
What kind of nut? Not sure.
They're nuts. Peanuts. Hazelnut.
They're nuts. Cashews. But they're not.
Game over.
Time for the results.
Did you know that only one of these is a nut?
I didn't know that, no.
That's right.
We may call them all nuts, but only one is a true botanical nut -
the hazelnut.
# Nuts, nuts to you! #
So if our other two nuts aren't nuts, what are they?
Horticulturist Catherine Cutler has brought me to a cashew tree
to help me understand.
Why is a cashew nut not an actual nut?
It's not actually a nut, because it's a drupe.
So... What is a drupe? A drupe. It's a botanical term.
Perhaps, as a layperson, you'd normally use the word fruit.
But it's like almonds, walnuts - they're all fruits,
which have got a seed inside.
And so this we call a cashew apple, or cashew pear.
That is the weirdest-looking thing.
The cashew drupe is clearly visible
below the yellow, swollen stem of the plant.
Walnuts, almonds and pecans are also drupes,
and some consider the macadamia to be one, too.
They all have a fleshy outer layer.
And what about my other nutty impostor?
Peanuts form under the ground.
So peanuts aren't true nuts, either.
This a much more closely related to beans and to peas.
So what are they, then? They're legumes.
Legumes form in a pod, just like the garden pea.
So even its name is a lie.
It's not a peanut. It's a pea legume.
The hazelnut, by contrast, is defined as a true botanical nut,
because its hard shell doesn't release the seed inside naturally
when it's ready to be picked.
But however these nuts, drupes and legumes grow,
the one thing they have in common
is that the nutty part we eat is the seed of the plant.
I'm meeting dietician Azmina Govindji
to uncover what that means for their nutritional value.
Foods that we commonly consider to be nuts are broadly similar
in nutritional breakdown, because a nut is the seed of the plant
that's responsible for reproduction.
So the nutrients and the energy that's in that tiny seed
is enough to make it grow into a brand-new plant.
And it's this that makes them such dietary heroes.
I've always thought that nuts were healthy. Is that true?
Yeah, they're great. They're low in sugar.
They're mostly high in fibre and they're high in fat.
All right. So that's a hazelnut.
Right. And more than half of the weight of that hazelnut is fat.
That seems like a lot of fat.
That's surely not that good for us.
Well, you're right. Excess saturated fat isn't good for us,
Cos it's been linked with high blood cholesterol.
But the good news is that the type of fat in nuts
is polyunsaturated and monounsaturated,
and these types actually help
to maintain a healthy blood cholesterol.
I'm going to have one right now.
Can I do a pick and mix? That's the best, because, actually,
although they're similar in nutrients,
there are variations between different nuts.
So, for example, cashews... Yeah.
..have got twice the carbohydrate as hazelnuts and much less fibre,
but they're a good source of iron and zinc.
But if you after fibre and its healthy gut benefits,
the hazelnut is one of the best options,
while peanuts are packed with protein,
making them a perfect post-workout snack.
However, Brazils are the king of nuts.
So Brazil nuts are the richest dietary source of selenium.
What is selenium?
Selenium is needed to maintain a normal immune function.
Just by having one Brazil nut a day, you get your daily selenium needs.
So even though not all nuts are technically botanical nuts,
they are, in their own way, really, really good for us.
Absolutely.
At the factory...
..my cereal bar soldiers
have reached the last stage of their journey
and are lining up for a final inspection.
What am I watching here - high-speed bars?
This is the last point we get to have a check of the bar
before it goes into the wrapper.
After all that handcrafting, it's about to get fully automated.
This nifty scanner uses three laser sensors
to check our bars as they zoom past.
If they're broken or stuck together, they won't make it past this point.
Any rejects are blown off the belt
by a super-fast, six-millisecond jet of air.
But they do get a second chance.
The rejects are sent back through the scanner one last time,
with less than 1% going to waste.
So if I was a bit mischievous here,
and I put one bar on top of another, would it notice? Yeah.
Excuse me.
I can't resist a challenge.
GREGG LAUGHS
Scanner wins.
My little squadron has made the grade,
and this lot needs wrapping up now.
And, with no time to lose,
they hurtle on towards a hi-tech wrapping robot.
The bars are separated by 2.5cm
and a wrapper is folded around each one.
They're then sealed and cut at each end.
Well, this is the fastest-moving thing in the factory, this is.
It is, yeah.
My wrapped little beauties
channel, nine at a time, into a slotted conveyor.
It's almost as if they're loading up a gun belt.
That's what we call our turbo train.
A synchronised robot arm with nine suction cups gently lifts the bars
and places them in threes on another conveyor.
It takes just seven minutes to wrap and box my 1,440 bars.
I see lots of packing, but I still think it's my favourite bit,
cos everything happens so quickly.
It's great to watch, innit? It is. It's fantastic. Thank you.
You're very welcome. I had a lovely, lovely time.
I've had so much fun. It's been great. Thank you for your help.
At the end of the line,
my boxed-up batch joins 5,760 other bars on pallets
and the whole pile is wrapped in cellophane.
The pallets are driven from the production area
100 metres down the road to distribution.
After just four hours of sorting, roasting, mixing and cooling,
our cereal bars are ready
to be set free in the world.
Company co-founder Praveen Vijn is overseeing the operation.
Praveen.
Hello, my friend. How are you? Good.
Listen, my batch. 1,440 bars. Yeah.
There's more than that on there, surely?
Got 115,000 on that vehicle today. Is there really? There is, yeah.
And how many of these trucks leave the factory every day?
About five to ten go out every day.
So how many bars leave the factory every week? 1.9 million.
Serious amount of bars. It's quite a bit.
Where's the furthest you go? One is in Tahiti.
And also we have this beautiful little post office
in northern Norway. It's just inside the Arctic Circle.
So these little bars from Essex basically go all over the world?
From Halstead to the world.
37 countries across the globe take delivery of these bars.
But their biggest fans are in the UK,
where Londoners eat the most.
Well, this isn't one of the biggest factories I've ever visited,
that's for sure, but it is one of the friendliest.
What surprised me is a lot of the ingredients
are added to the bar by hand,
and I can clearly see them through the wrapper.
But, most of all, do you know what?
I've had a lot of fun.