Every self-respecting packed lunch has one of these - a yogurt -
and we Brits love 'em,
eating a whopping 500,000 tonnes of the stuff every year.
That's a massive yogurt shopping bill of £1.4 billion.
Whether you like natural or Greek, fruity or fat-free...
..you can find them all here.
In a factory that produces nearly 2,500 tonnes of yogurt
every single week.
Come on, you beauty!
I'm Gregg Wallace.
Oh! LAUGHTER
I'm not very good, am I?
And, tonight, I'm getting sucked into yogurt-making,
meeting the cows that get it moo-ving!
They are really scary and huge.
And helping the humans who keep it sweet.
How much fruit do you go through a day?
11 tonnes of fruit a day.
Mate, there's not that much fruit in the world!
I'm Cherry Healey...
Whoa-ho!
..and I'm down on the farm, where we're harvesting
enough blackcurrants...
..to make a year's supply of yogurt.
And dreams come true for historian Ruth Goodman...
I'd love to have a go - I'll be honest.
..as she takes the wheel of a British classic...
Woo!
..to reveal the history of the electric milk float.
She's a robust little thing, isn't she?
Woo! RUTH LAUGHS
One million yogurt pots will leave this factory every 24 hours.
And we're going to reveal just how they do it.
Welcome to Inside The Factory.
This is the Yeo Valley yogurt factory in rural Somerset.
Every year, they churn out 125,000 tonnes of yogurt -
that's enough to fill 60 Olympic-size swimming pools.
The site produces 94 different types of yogurt.
Tonight, I'll be learning how they make one of their best sellers -
the organic fruity flavours multipack,
made up of raspberry, peach, strawberry
and blackcurrant-flavoured yogurts.
But, first, I'm taking a short stroll to meet the crack team
of heavyweights who get yogurt production started.
COWS MOO
A herd of organic Friesian cows.
Gabby? Hello.
Looking after them on the factory's very own farm is Gabby Coles.
Rather her than me!
This isn't my usual factory setting, I have to say.
But I get it, right?
Yogurt - we need milk, so we need cows.
And that's it, right? It's about the milk.
Not quite. It all starts from the grass
and that starts from the soil.
If you see what we've got here, so we've got some clover layers,
some rye grass, and we also have some herbal layers mixed in.
So these are all organic cows, what we have here,
so they've got to have at least 60% grass to be organic
and also we don't use any fertilisers or pesticides
or anything like that.
So, basically, the better the quality the grass,
the better quality milk.
Before we think about the milk, we think about the grass,
and, before that, we think about the soil. Exactly, exactly.
Any chance I can see these being milked?
In fact, is it anywhere near milking time? It is.
All we've got to do is get these in first
and then I'll show you how to milk them.
They're a bit scary, to be honest.
You milk them. I'll... I'll stand and watch.
I'm sure I'll get you involved. No, no, no.
Show me where, show me where.
Yogurt production started on the farm back in the mid '70s,
with just 35 cows.
Things have changed a bit since then
and the herd is now 240-strong.
What do they do in the evenings?
Obviously there's not cow telly to watch, is there?
They don't watch the Evening Moos!
The herd produces 6,000 litres of milk a day,
that sounds like a lot, but, incredibly,
it's less than 2% of the yogurt factory's daily intake,
with the rest coming from a local co-op of organic farms.
Come on.
Milking these bulky beasts is no tiny undertaking -
especially for a city boy like me.
They are really scary and huge.
Are they supposed to be this big?
Is that a sign of there's loads of milk in there...?
Full of milk, yeah.
I'm getting the hang of this cow lark.
As they come into the milking parlour,
electronic tags on their necks identify each cow.
The computer then calculates how much high-energy feed
to give each one based on their milk yield.
And while they munch away happily,
Gabby and I get busy down the business end.
So I've got to wipe the cows' teats? Yeah.
Am I likely to get a kick in the face? Um...
Have you had a kick in the face?
I've been close to it. SHE LAUGHS
This is getting better and better, this!
Cleaning the teats with antiseptic wipes gets rid of poo and dirt.
It also replicates the sucking action of a calf
and stimulates the milk.
Oh, this one's stamping its foot!
Now, it either doesn't like me or it wants to dance.
Do you recognise the back of the cows?
Yeah, I pretty much know them from the back end.
So, if one came up to you in a field and said hello,
you wouldn't recognise it,
but if it backed into you, you would?
I mean, I'd know it more from its back end,
but a lot of them I still know from their face.
Now we've got to put the units on.
Now... HE SIGHS, SHE LAUGHS
The units, or clusters, attach to the cows' udders
and extract milk using a gentle vacuum.
Well, that's what you're supposed to do with them.
Automated milking usually takes just six minutes per cow.
Are you ready? Yeah.
If I don't come out of here, I want to be buried in Kent.
OK, got you.
But that doesn't include the time it takes to get the clusters on.
Oh!
Do you feel the vacuum taking it on? So... Yeah.
Oh, she's moving, she's moving.
Listen, it's hard enough as it is!
Come on!
So, I'm proud of myself there. Look at that. Look!
I'm really pleased I did that.
I come from an inner city area,
I normally get nervous when I run out of concrete.
I found that very scary.
But I did it, right? You did it.
The clusters are finally on, the milk is flowing
and production of our yogurt has begun.
That's the happiest cow along this line. Is it?
Oh, yeah. Gentle, I am. See?
There! Look at that.
Our milk is piped, filtered and cooled
from the cow's body temperature of 38.5C
to a chilly three degrees.
Right, so these are ready to go now.
Big old lumps, aren't they? Look at them.
It's stored in a 16,000-litre bulk tank
before being piped into a refrigerated truck
and driven to the yogurt factory a handy ten minutes up the road.
We've been drinking good old cow's milk for thousands of years.
However, these days, plant-based milk drinks are getting
more and more popular,
but can they ever really replace dairy in our daily cuppa?
Cherry's been finding out.
It's coffee o'clock.
I can't wait for my first sip in the morning
and it's got to have lots of milk.
But lately, when we go to order a coffee,
we are confronted with an array of options.
Please, can I try an oat cappuccino?
Of course, no problem.
Six in ten of us have tried plant-based milk substitutes
in our coffee shop drinks.
But with so many alternatives on the market,
how do we know which is the right one to use?
And which will work best in my coffee?
Helping me put them to the test is food scientist Dr Stu Farrimond.
Hi, Dr Stu! Cherry, great to see you. I see you came prepared.
Talk me through my options.
You have coconut, oat, rice,
soya, almond, but there's plenty more.
So, how do we even get milk if there is no cow?
It's not actually milk.
These are actually juices.
All you do, basically, is you get the grain, the nut,
or whatever it is, and you soak it or you boil it and you squeeze it.
So much like you get an orange to make orange juice,
you squeeze it, and that juice that comes out,
that is your milk substitute.
Cow's milk works well in coffee because the proteins in it bind
with the coffee's tannins, making it less bitter.
Plant-based alternatives come with added ingredients like calcium
to mimic the original,
but can they really cut it in my coffee?
We're putting the top five sellers to the test.
First up, soy.
Ew...! My cow's milk never curdles like this.
That looks really unappealing.
What is going on in there?
As strange as it might sound, the protein of the soy is cooking
in the acid of the coffee,
causing them to bundle up and float to the surface.
So soy, in fact, is not the perfect milk alternative.
That soy isn't for your coffee,
but we've got one here that has added calcium.
The calcium protects those proteins from being cooked by the acid.
So, will the added calcium regulate the acidity
and stop this soy product from curdling?
I have a lovely, milky smooth coffee.
No curdling. Lovely.
It tastes quite nutty.
It definitely doesn't taste like milk. Mm.
Next up, oat.
It has a porridge-y tone to it... Mm.
..probably cos it's oats.
Well, interestingly, oat and coffee share a lot of flavour compounds,
so, naturally, oat and coffee go together very well.
I do think it's a good team.
So, oat is a contender.
How will rice do?
It doesn't taste bad.
It almost has no flavour whatsoever. Very neutral.
It's weird having rice in my coffee, but, you know, I'll go with it.
Finally, we have almond and coconut.
SHE COUGHS
Both really strong flavours that, for me, overpowered the coffee.
I think my favourite was the oat.
Even though it did have a really distinct oaty flavour,
I thought it was delicious.
So, oat for coffee.
But for those of us committed to a dairy-free diet,
which milk alternative copes best with cooking?
We're challenging them with
a traditional Yorkshire pudding recipe.
Quick, quick, quick, quick.
OK.
Protein in regular milk gives the batter strength and structure
as the Yorkies puff up.
Let's see if the others will rise to the challenge.
Yowzers! Wow, they're good.
Never seen Yorkshire puddings like that before, have you?
That's an alien Yorkshire pudding.
All right, so we have the rice, the soya,
the almond, the coconut,
the milk and the oat.
I think the whole milk one is best. Yes, definitely.
The almond there, that's sort of erupted.
This one here - the soy - isn't bad. That's...
I think that's pretty good. ..probably the next second best.
I'd buy that, I'd buy that.
The soy made a better-looking pud than the other milk alternatives,
but why?
So, soy is the only one that has anything like approaching
the protein that you have in the milk.
Why is the protein so crucial for the rise?
As it rises, it's the protein that catches the bubbles of steam,
so it lifts up and you get the lovely finish
and, without it, you end up with a flat pud.
Mm!
That's a good Yorkie. Mm! Lovely rise.
Crackin'!
So, soy is the baker's friend,
but sweeter nut and rice milks are better for desserts.
However, nut flavours can overpower savoury dishes,
so neutral-tasting oat is probably best for them.
Today has been really interesting... And tasty. And tast... Very tasty.
..because not one size fits all.
The thing to bear in mind, Cherry, is we're still at the stage
where we're trying to find something that's going to be
an absolute replacement for milk,
but none of these are, as we've discovered today.
So maybe, in the future, we'll be able to appreciate
that each is an individual ingredient in their own right.
Let's face it, finding a direct substitute for cow's milk
was never going to be easy.
But if you do want to try the alternatives,
you might want to invest
in a bigger fridge.
COW MOOS
Four hours into production, all 240 cows are milked
and our tanker has made the short trip from farm to factory.
So, with hair net on, I'm heading to the milk intake area
to meet supply manager Adam Fry.
Adam, this is my milk.
I want you to take special care of this, OK?
Of course.
How much milk is on here?
So there's 28,000 litres on this tanker. Wow!
That's a serious amount of milk, right?
To keep yogurt production moving 24/7,
12 of these monster tankers deliver organic milk every day
from the factory's own farm nearby and others within 20 miles.
Then it's stored in these giant silos.
All these silos are full of milk, right? Yes.
So how many litres of milk do you have here?
On site we hold around about 350,000 litres of milk.
How long would that last you?
If you didn't get another delivery in, how long would that last you?
That's a day's worth of production.
You go through 350,000 litres a day? Every day.
Give me an idea. What is that?
That would be around about 600 bathtubs in a silo.
Bathtubs? 600 bathtubs in each silo?
And you've got six of them? Six of them.
I think even Cleopatra would be happy with that.
I think she would.
Each of the silos stores enough milk to make 154,000 pots of yogurt.
Put all six silos together
and we've got milk to make more than 900,000 pots.
But before a drop of my milk can leave the tanker,
Adam has to take a sample for testing.
I find that incredibly comforting, that you still use a bucket.
So, we take the sample.
Mate, that's going to be a very small bowl of breakfast cereal.
I don't think that one would keep you happy in the mornings.
Time for a test, right?
Time for a test. These are ready now.
As we stand by, my milk whizzes up to the factory's lab,
which deals with up to 250 samples every day.
What exactly are we testing for?
So, we're testing now for the fat content of the milk
to ensure that it's between 3.6% and 4.6%.
That gives us the average amount of fat that you'd see in cow's milk.
If it was outside of that, there would be something wrong.
Ah, I see! That's the average fat in milk anyway, right?
That's the average fat that you would see in milk. Ah, OK!
When will I know whether my milk's OK?
That process takes five minutes to complete.
What if he's gone off to have a cup of tea and a biscuit?
With 4.6% milk, I think I'd have coffee.
But if the milk fails the test,
the entire 28,000-litre tanker will be sent back to the farm.
Results are zapped from the lab to the loading bay.
And there you can see it on the screen.
It's just come through now that it's ready to go. Fine.
So it's passed all of our tests. We can unload, right?
Yep, we're ready to unload The milk's good!
I knew it anyway. Milk's good! You can unload.
Pumping at a rate of 250kg per minute,
my milk is then moved to the raw milk blend area...
..where it is mixed with cream and skimmed milk powder.
Are we finally making yogurt?
So, this is us making yogurt.
How much are we making? How much is a batch?
So, we're making a 25,000-litre batch.
25,000 litres...? 25,000 litres.
How many pots is that, please?
That would make around about 150,000 pots.
Right. So, what are we doing here?
So, here we would be adding dry ingredients,
such as protein powders or, in this case, organic sugar.
The sugar comes in hefty 25-kilo bags.
And you've got to tip them in there?
Yeah, they've got to go into here.
Sounds easy enough!
The sugar's sucked through a funnel and a spaghetti junction of pipes
to the mixing tank,
where it's blended with the liquid ingredients.
ENGINE WHIRS Oi-oi!
It's like a rocket's going to take off!
Oh...!
How many bags are we putting in here?
So there'll be 36 bags in total going into a 25,000-litre vat.
Sugar makes up just 3% of the yogurt's ingredients,
but it's still a backbreaking 900 kilos.
This isn't an easy job after all.
Oh, it's going down now.
# Clap your hands if you're working too hard... #
The sugar's got to go through at a steady pace.
If the flow slows, air will get in
and the yogurt recipe will be ruined.
It won't rip!
It won't rip and it's emptying!
Quick, you get in there!
Adam to the rescue.
You rip, I'll put the bags on.
GREGG GROANS
Crikey!
That's 25 kilos... 25 kilos.
That's the same weight as a bag of spuds.
Making yogurt shouldn't be this physical, should it?
I'm sugared!
But there's no time to rest.
It's bucket time!
Before my newly blended mix of milk, cream, skimmed milk powder and sugar
can move on, there's another trip to the lab.
So that's ready now to be off and tested
to make sure it hits specifications.
You lead on.
What about your bucket?!
I'll get it.
OK, how many tests will these guys be doing?
So, these guys will be doing three tests in total.
They will test this for its fat content, its total solids
and for its pH.
That means my milk mix has got to have the right creaminess,
thickness and acidity to make yogurt.
How long is it going to be?
It's going to be around about ten minutes.
I've got a deck of cards.
Let's hope the odds are stacked in our favour
because if any of the tests fail,
it's game over for my 25,000-litre batch.
Have you finished? How'd we get on? A pass. Yeah!
My milk mix has come up trumps,
so it's piped across to milk base processing
for more high-tech treatment.
First, it's homogenised by distributing
the milk's fat content evenly to make it silky smooth.
The homogeniser forces the liquid through tiny three-millimetre holes
at high pressure, smashing the fat globules into minuscule particles,
mixing them through the milk for a glossy finish.
Then it's on to pasteurisation -
the process of killing off harmful bacteria through heating.
Flowing through the pasteuriser at a rate of 15,000 litres per hour,
the milk blend is warmed to 98C for around three minutes,
leaving me with a food-safe mix that's ready to be made into yogurt.
Now, when I was a kid, I remember our milk appearing as if by magic
at the crack of dawn.
We never heard the milkman arriving.
Ruth's been looking back at the ground-breaking electric vehicles
they used to get the job done very quietly.
The whir of an electric motor,
the glow of headlights on a crisp morning
and the clink of glass bottles.
50 years ago, such sights and sounds were synonymous
with the daily delivery of milk to your front door.
BOTTLES CLINK
And the fleet of milk floats delivering predawn pints
became a British icon.
To find out their origins, I'm meeting Denis Chick
at the Wythall Transport Museum.
So, when did the electric milk float start?
1920s. OK.
Up until then, horses were pulling the milk floats.
The problem was the horses were becoming not very practical.
Milk sales went up, loads went up,
horses started to complain about the loads
and an alternative was needed,
so the electric float was developed.
And when was this? 1923.
But this wasn't the first electric vehicle.
As early as the 1880s,
electric cars were powered by rechargeable batteries.
But, by the turn of the century,
they were being overtaken by petrol cars,
which were faster and travelled further.
But the sturdy little electric milk float endured
Why on Earth did the milk industry not go with petrol?
Petrol was expensive to run, petrol or diesel engines
needed maintaining, and it's cheap to run with electricity,
cheap to maintain and did exactly the job it was needed to do in a day
on a full charge of electricity.
And then you charge it again overnight,
and off you go the next day for another day's work.
And, of course, the electric floats were quiet
for those predawn deliveries.
As the British thirst for pints on the doorstep grew,
the '50s and '60s saw a milk float boom.
And by the 1970s, there were 50,000 on our roads -
the most extensive use of electric vehicles in the world.
And I have a very personal link to them.
Do you know, way back in 1925, this is what my grandfather was doing?
Aged 14, he was in charge of milk deliveries.
Really? 14?! 14 years old... Oh, my goodness.
..on the public road, blind in one eye.
As well?! Yeah! I'm glad I wasn't around!
I'd love to have a go - I'll be honest.
You can't drive this one. This is a museum exhibit, I'm afraid.
But there are still a few on the road. Oh, really?
You should seek one out. Yes, it's great fun. Hmm...
I think that this could be in my blood.
MUSIC: Peer Gynt Suite No.1 Op.46: Morning Mood by Edvard Grieg
So I've set my alarm for 5am to meet Paul Cartmell,
who's been a milkman for 40 years,
but his electric milk float has been in the business even longer.
Built in 1975, it's still delivering every day.
Hi, Paul! Hiya! Good morning! How long have you been up?
Since two o'clock.
Since two?! Yeah. Good grief!
I don't want to get in your way,
but if there's anything I can do to help...
You can drive it, if you want. Really? Yeah. Can I really? Yeah.
I'll show you how to get it going.
What a thrill!
Finally behind the wheel of a working electric milk float.
Let's hope me and the bottles make it through in one piece!
The only thing you need to know is you've got two pedals. Yeah.
The small one is to go... And that one's to stop? It is.
Take your handbrake off... OK. ..and press that pedal.
Oh, God. Woo!
Where am I going?
MUSIC: Riding On My Bike by Madness
Woo! She's a robust little thing, isn't she?
It might not go fast, but, woo!
SHE LAUGHS
A bit more, a bit more, a bit more...
God, this is a fun little thing to drive!
Electric floats like this delivered 90% of our milk
right up until the 1980s,
when cheaper supermarket prices
almost killed off the morning milk round.
These days, just 3% of the UK's milk arrives on our doorsteps.
But, in recent years, the service has been thrown a lifeline
from an unlikely rescuer.
It's been a steady decline for a long time
and then we saw a nice increase
when they did the David Attenborough programme
about plastics in the sea.
After Blue Planet highlighted plastic pollution in our oceans
in 2017, Paul's milk supplier saw orders increase by 30%.
A lot of people who were using plastics
then chose to go on glass, which is good.
I know it costs a little bit more,
but every single bottle gets used over and over and over again.
In fact, the empty bottles that Paul returns to the dairy
are reused an incredible 30 times before they're recycled.
Here we are, well into the 21st century,
using a 45-year-old milk float and delivering milk in glass bottles.
And yet, suddenly, this outdated method is looking rather
like a sustainable solution for the future.
Back in Somerset, it's been eight hours since cow-milking commenced.
My 25,000 litres of milk blend has been mixed,
tested, homogenised and pasteurised.
So it's pumped to the incubation hall,
where I'm meeting the factory's technical scientist - Chris Coggins.
Chris. All right? Good to meet you.
What are you doing in that freezer
and what has it got to do with my yogurt?
I'm getting the cultures out.
What are cultures?
Cultures are a collection of bacteria
that have been specially selected to make yogurt.
I can't help but think that bacteria might be a bad thing.
No, you have good bacteria and you have bad bacteria.
It's good bacteria, not bad bacteria.
So what part does bacteria play in our yogurt-making?
The bacteria will live off of the natural milk sugars, lactose,
it will break that lactose down into lactic acid,
which is what makes yogurt acidic,
and it will also give the yogurt thickness as well.
Can I see them? Yes, of course you can.
Oh! Not what I expected.
They actually look like little frozen sweets. Yeah.
That much there is probably getting on for a billion bacteria.
That's ridiculous, isn't it?
And how many of these do we need for our batch of yogurt?
We need seven bags of this.
So billions and billions and billions of bacteria? Yeah.
Amazing.
My bacteria may be the microscopic magicians
that turn my milk mixture to yogurt...
Come on, then. Oh, he's just put them in a shopping bag.
It's like Bacteria R US.
..but if you want to make yogurt on a massive scale,
you need some serious hardware.
This is the incubation hall.
It contains 12 giant stainless steel tanks.
They've got a combined capacity of a quarter of a million litres
and are the colossal cooking pots where 90 million litres of milk
turns to yogurt every year.
So, this is our tank.
Whoa!
It's a little bit warm at the moment.
Yeah, it's hot.
This is your milk base going in here now.
Right, and now I have to empty these into there?
So now we've got to add the bacteria so that we can produce yogurt.
This is getting very interesting.
Would you let me do it? I don't see why not.
Have they actually got names, these different bacteria? Yes.
There are three different bacteria in there -
streptococcus thermophilus...
GREGG LAUGHS
..lactobacillus acidophilus... No!
..and bifidobacterium.
My tongue-twisting bacteria occur naturally on plants,
but, for yogurt production,
they're grown under controlled conditions in a lab
and it takes just 3.5 kilos of them
to turn my 25,000-litre milk mix to yogurt.
Do you know roughly how many bacteria I'm putting in here?
Yes. Every gram will be about 100 million.
This is beyond my comprehension.
This tank is kept at 42 degrees C
to encourage the bacteria to multiply.
Go on, kids! Have a whale of a time!
Bye!
They seem happy to me.
The bacteria doubles every 30 minutes
until there are 100 billion friendly bacteria for every gram of yogurt.
To check it's working, after six and a half hours,
a sample is taken for lab test number three.
Now, that looks like yogurt. That looks good.
Right, how do I test this now?
Right, take the probes
and now place them in the yogurt...
..and that will tell you what the pH is.
Our pH is currently below 4.6,
so it's now safe to eat.
Right, OK. So now what do we do?
All we've got to do is initiate the cooling.
There you are. Away it goes.
The tank is cooled for another four hours
to slow the action of that busy bacteria.
And while my mix cools, it's on to the next vital ingredient - fruit!
My multipack yogurts need strawberries, raspberries,
peaches and apricots, which all come from Europe.
But the blackcurrants are harvested right here, in the UK.
Cherry went to give them a hand.
I've been up since the crack of dawn
and I'm here, in South Herefordshire,
to help out with the biggest blackcurrant harvest in the UK.
In a very short window of about six weeks,
an entire year's supply of these little juicy currants
need to be picked and stored,
so I should probably...get moving!
Overseeing the harvest is farm owner Anthony Snell.
Hello, Anthony! Hi, Cherry.
Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
What a beautiful field!
The bushes are absolutely dense with blackcurrants
and they do look very big and juicy and beautiful.
So, these are ready to be harvested?
Yes, and, as soon as they're ready, we check the natural sugar levels
and we inspect them daily
to make sure that there's no green or red fruits.
When do you start your day, is it pretty early?
We wait until the bushes are nice and dry in the morning,
otherwise, if you start harvesting very early in the morning
when they're wet, you get slugs and snails up the bushes.
So it's thanks to the snails
that you don't have to get up at the crack of dawn.
That's right. Thanks, snails! That's convenient.
I wish someone had told me that!
With only one week left to finish this entire harvest,
Anthony's son James needs an experienced driver
for one of the harvesters...
..but he's got me instead.
Hello, James. Oh, hi, Cherry.
Can I come aboard? Yes, of course.
Wow! This is a big machine.
The farm has almost 300 acres of blackcurrants -
around half of that is devoted to organic cultivation.
ENGINE STARTS Whoa-ho!
There we are. That was really fun.
Each of the two harvesters gathers in 15 to 25 tonnes of fruit a day.
Is that right? Yeah, that's good, that's good.
Inside the harvester, the berries are shaken off the branches,
conveyor belts catch the falling fruit
and take them to a team of sorters boxing up the berries at the back.
There's so much to do.
I mean, I'm so conscious that, if I lose concentration,
I could wipe out the whole row of bushes.
In this short six-week harvest, James and the team will collect
a massive 650 tonnes of blackcurrants -
the same weight as half a dozen blue whales.
And this year, almost 10% of that is going to yogurt production
at our factory.
So, reluctantly, I need to let the professionals get back to work.
I'll give you your captain's hat back. Thank you very much.
Good luck with the rest of the harvest. Thank you.
Woo! That was fun.
Just glad to be contributing to the nation's yogurts.
But I'm not finished yet.
To maintain freshness, the blackcurrants get from field
to freezer in less than an hour.
And this massive unit stores a year's supply.
I mean, it is absolutely freezing in here!
I'm wearing my ski things and I'm still really cold.
What's the temperature in here?
So, it's a minimum of minus 18.
Are these all blackcurrants? They are.
That's incredible.
How long do they stay in this freezer
before they go to make yogurts?
We just supply when the customer demands them.
So you actually hold on to them until they need them?
Yeah. That's the beauty of a freezing process like this,
is that you can store products for up to two years,
just exactly the same quality as when they're fresh.
You can have British fruit all year round.
This freezer holds 300 tonnes of fruit on 1,000 pallets
in subarctic conditions.
This is what it feels like to be a fish finger in my freezer. Yeah.
Just hours since they were shaken from their bushes,
my blackcurrants are now sorted, boxed and frozen solid.
And now they'll wait patiently in the freezer
until they're ready to be sent off to Gregg.
Back at the factory, I'm nine hours into production.
My milk blend has been mixed with bacteria
to make a 25,000-litre batch of plain yogurt.
And while it cools in a giant incubation tank,
I'm heading 42 miles down the road
to the processing plant at Crewkerne,
where they make the four fruity conserves for my yogurt.
A whopping 20 tonnes of Cherry's frozen blackcurrants
have just arrived.
Team manager Matt Pullen takes charge of them from here.
Matt, right? Yep. All right, Gregg?
And these are our Cherry's currants? Blackcurrants, yep.
And we're going to be sorting them on the sorting table today.
Can I have a go? Yeah, of course you can. Come on round.
What do I do? So, you need to bang the box on the table -
that will break up any lumps of frozen blackcurrants inside the box.
Oh, this is great fun! Can I have another go? Yeah.
There you go.
OK. So, now remove the tape.
Whoa! They're lovely.
Ooh, look at them.
It feels like cold marbles.
Most of the stalks are removed back at the farm,
but an eight-metre-long conveyor carries the blackcurrants
through one final check.
Have you ever been pulled along by a strong currant?
My river of blackcurrants flows at a rate of 600 kilos an hour,
so you need eyes out on stalks for this job.
Right, what are we looking for?
So we're looking for anything that shouldn't be there.
Bits of stalk, bits of leaf, misformed blackcurrants.
So that? Yep.
You wouldn't want that in your yogurt, would you? A shrivelled one.
Because they're frozen, does that help them keep their shape?
It will help them throughout our process.
We try to retain as much of the fruit ID as we possibly can.
Fruit ID? Yeah. Fruit ID?
And does the fruit have to carry its ID with it wherever it goes
in case it's stopped by a yogurt policeman?
Identities intact, the blackcurrants line up for a final check
at the metal detector.
Then we head upstairs to turn some of Cherry's berries
into fruity conserve for my yogurt.
Coming through!
Got your currants!
This cooking area has six giant vessels
that churn out 20 tonnes of fruit conserve every day.
We're making the one-tonne blackcurrant batch.
First, 238 kilos of water is added to the pot...
..before Cherry's frozen blackcurrants are tipped in
by the 100-kilo bucket-load.
How many of those have we got to get in there?
Another four. Five in total. 500 kilos of fruit?
How much fruit do you go through a day?
11 tonnes of fruit a day. 11 ton...?! Every day?!
Mate, there's not that much fruit in the world!
That's the blackcurrant equivalent of seven family cars.
But even on this massive scale, nothing's wasted.
What are you going to do with that, get the ice off your windscreen?
Scraping stray currants into a vat?
That can't be BERRY hard!
I think I've got some blackcurrants up my sleeve!
Outsmarted by frozen fruit - that's got to be a first.
THEY LAUGH
Even I can't go too far wrong with the next ingredient...
Wahey!
..sugar!
Sweet!
Into the frozen fruit and water goes 142 kilos of cane sugar
to sweeten the blackcurrants.
# Sweet dreams are made of these... #
It's like an alpine snow scene!
You could ski on that...
..if I could ski.
The vessel is heated and the sugary fruit is cooked with starch,
lemon juice and blackcurrant flavouring.
It is just like making jam at home, but on a massive scale.
An hour later, my conserve is complete.
Right, let's have a go.
All the flavour of the fruit is there, but that is sharp.
You're going to need some yogurt to take the sharpness away.
The conserve is pumped directly from cooking vessel
to a vertical form fill sealer.
Yep, that's a bagging machine to you and me.
The 9kg blackcurrant bags are air-cooled
and loaded onto trucks bound for the yogurt factory.
Of course, conserve is just a posh word for jam
and, in my opinion, the best accompaniment to jam
is clotted cream, dolloped on top of a freshly baked scone,
but where and when did this famous combo first come together?
Ruth has dared to take on this contentious debate.
On July 1st 1904, a six-carriage locomotive left
London Paddington en route to Devon and Cornwall,
marketed as a high-speed rail link
from the capital to the West Country.
This new route became known as the Cornish Riviera Express.
and suddenly the southwest became an even more popular destination.
Visitor numbers boomed, and a part of that holiday experience
in the West Country was this culinary indulgence -
the cream tea.
Now, there have been very many mysteries investigated
and solved on steam trains,
but there's one mystery that's still hotly debated round here.
Where did the cream tea come from in the first place?
I'm meeting food historian Dr Annie Gray
to find some answers to this culinary controversy.
Annie! Hello! Hello!
Well, this all looks very scone-like to me.
Well, over there you've got scones, it's true.
But over here, what I'm doing is I'm starting off with a thing
called a split, which is a bit more like a bun
with a sort of enriched dough - almost like a brioche -
which is really what people would've had
with their cream and their jam and their tea
before the scone came along.
So, it was the soft and sweet yeast bun known as the split
that had been a speciality in the southwest for generations.
But the new trains that brought the tourists also brought new food,
including the scone, from Scotland.
Scones, which was originally poverty food, started to spread out
from Scotland, just because you've got now the means to transport that.
And people are travelling everywhere -
servants are travelling, aristocrats are travelling,
middle classes are travelling.
Everyone is everywhere, going, "What's this? This is great.
"I'm having some of that back in my own county."
By the middle of the 20th century, the scone had become
a firm favourite in the West Country's growing number
of cafes and tea rooms
and the split fell out of favour.
So, why did a Scottish thing take over?
So, what's happening is you've got a lot of people wanting something
in the afternoon which needs to be cheap, cheerful
and easy to prepare,
and the scone just lends itself so much better to that.
So, what is the major difference, then, between a split and a scone?
Essentially, this has yeast in it as its rising agent,
so it's going to take a couple of hours to rise.
You bake it like a bread, it eats like a bread.
A scone has baking powder in, it's quick, it's easy,
it doesn't really require any time to rise.
You bake it - job done.
So, this is my dough for the split.
If I give you that...
Ah! I knew I'd be doing something.
So, it seems Scottish scones became the basis of the cream tea
purely for convenience.
So, if we're thinking of this not as a traditional regional dish,
but rather as a regional solution to commercially feeding tourists,
it's one controversy after another, isn't it, really?
Yeah, and we haven't even got on to jam and cream yet.
Oh, dear.
While the simple and convenient scones go in the oven
and the splits prove before baking,
there's just enough time to get one thing straight.
Tell me that at least the clotted cream
is actually a West Country thing.
Clouted cream, as it was known, was made across Britain.
But because the milk was so good here -
the cream was particularly good -
it does have a definite claim to be a proper West Country product.
So, it's not an exclusive product?
It's merely that West Country clotted cream
is some of the best clotted cream. Yes.
So, that's the cream cleared up.
But, as we sit down to our freshly baked scones and splits,
we hit the ultimate cream tea conundrum.
And, of course, we're back to controversy.
Is it the jam first, or the cream first?
Turns out we've gone for the two opposite options.
I've gone jam first, you've gone cream first.
Which of us is Devon and which of us is Cornwall?
Am I Devon? I think I might be Devon.
I think it all tastes the same when you do this.
But what about the split versus scone debate?
Is a split worth the extra weight?
The split's interesting. I like it.
It's not so rich as a scone.
The texture of a split, to me, is better.
But if you've got to feed the ravening hordes
at the drop of a hat, scones all the way. Yep. Or sc-ones.
And enjoy arguing about whether it's Scottish, Devon or Cornwall!
Or some sort of grand mix of the three!
THEY LAUGH
But wherever it comes from, one thing is certain -
the cream tea is a very tasty Great British invention.
And with a glorious view like this, you can't beat it.
I'm back at my West Country yogurt factory
and the blackcurrant conserve has arrived, too.
18 hours into production and my bacteria-rich plain yogurt mix
is cooling and thickening.
So, back in the incubation hall,
I'm catching up with supply manager Adam.
Good to see you again. Hello again, Gregg.
Are we ready? We are now ready.
So, the base has now cooled down to below 23 degrees
and it is ready to be drawn off
into one of the smaller mobile vessels.
Right. Shall we do it? We can do it. We're ready to start.
It's ready to go at the touch of a button.
As it's decanted from the towering incubation tanks to smaller vessels,
my 25,000 litres of yogurt passes through a superfine filter
with holes smaller than a fifth of a millimetre,
making it much smoother.
And what you'll see here is the final product, when it comes out,
has a nice polished sheen on the top of it.
Wow. Why polished? Cos it's shiny?
Cos it's shiny, yeah. That's incredible.
So the filter not only gets rid of the lumps,
but it makes it shiny - or polished.
And makes it more appealing.
Next time I open a pot of yogurt, I'm going to tell my wife
that this one is polished.
The buffed-up yogurt is finally ready for my fruity conserve.
Now, look at them. They are a thing of absolute beauty.
What are we going to do?
Are we going to put them in the pot with the yogurt?
They can't go straight in the tank. First, we need to give them a bath.
What?! Seriously? Seriously.
So, what we have here, we have a fruit bath
and, in here, each of these fruit bags go in as they are.
They don't need to be opened.
What we don't want is any unfortunate bad bacteria
to be added back into the product,
so it's actually sterilising the outside edge of the bag.
So the bacteria that make it into your yogurt
is not inside my currants - it may be on the bag?
It is purely the outside of the bag.
Do you know what? I never really trusted that bag.
The blackcurrant bags spend two minutes relaxing in the bath
before being cut open and the fruit squeezed into the yogurt.
Come on, you beauty, Come on.
Ah, ah... Ah-ha-ha.
Look at that.
Oh...! Watch your...! Ah...!
I've got a feeling I could end up in a right mess here.
HE LAUGHS
Did you not want to put them in the tank?
Yeah. This is fun.
What's the total weight of fruit going into our yogurt?
So, in an ideal world, 71 kilos.
The way you were fruiting that, around about 68.
I'm not very good, am I?
With just enough conserve in my yogurt...
..it heads off on a nifty little forklift to blending.
Let's see if I can give this job its just deserts.
So this is where you mix it? So this is where we mix it.
With that? With that.
That looks like, you know, like a stick blender
you get at home, in the kitchen - just an enormous one of them, right?
Just a giant hand blender.
Oh-ho-ho!
So imagine you're now on a grabber machine at the fair.
No prize for me yet.
It's got a mind of its own! Yep.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Come on! Come on! Ah...!
You better do this.
Is this a two-man job normally? No. It is, innit?
It's not. It is, innit? It's not.
It so is.
Well, someone here has mastered these tricky mixers
because the factory blends a mouthwatering 120 tonnes
of fruit yogurt every day.
Is that done now, then? Yeah, that's done.
Oh, come on, let's have a look at it. All right, OK.
That has got a lovely pink-purple tinge to it, hasn't it?
Am I allowed to taste it? You can, yes.
Well, I mean, I've been there through every stage of its life.
It's got a fine nose.
Very creamy, a little sour,
but a big fruity hit finish, most certainly.
A little bit of sharpness as well.
Have I got a bit on my nose? You have.
It's all right - it matches my apron.
Very true.
Despite my messy dabbling, my blackcurrant yogurt
is miraculously ready to move on to the filling area...
Mags! Hey, Gregg! Nice to meet you.
I'm coming up to see you.
OK.
..where shift manager Mags Gourley is ready to, well, manage me.
Hi, Gregg. Hey.
These must be our yogurt pots, right? They are our yogurt pots.
How many of these do you go through?
We pack 28,800 pots an hour.
That is seriously, seriously fast.
This looks like something I could master.
GREGG LAUGHS
Feed it in.
Oh...!
Or...maybe not.
Um... Are you going to jam up my machine, Gregg?
Um... There you are.
Whoa!
This side doesn't work properly. OK, try that side, then.
Um... They are joined together. They're twin pots.
You've got to be fast! Whoa, whoa, whoa!
Drop them down.
Once my stack falls into the feeder, individual pots are released
into a slatted conveyor with precise, pot-shaped holes.
A laser sensor then checks there are containers in every slot
before the yogurt is dispensed.
So, you'll see the pots being filled here.
What's happening right now it all the yogurts passing through
some pipe work into a device that we call the cock valve
and that individually deposits 120g into each pot.
How many of those every minute?
Every minute? 480.
How absolutely beautiful.
You must, every now and again, get a mishap
and the whole thing is just smothered in yogurt?
All over. Not very often, but it has happened.
Has it happened? Yeah.
And is it just, like, everywhere? Everywhere.
Can you give me a call when it happens?
Honestly, I'll make the journey.
One pair of pots is filled with raspberry and strawberry,
the other with peach and apricot, and my blackcurrant.
Then the lids are heated sealed at 200 C.
They're date coded and lifted to a conveyor belt which separates
the pairs of flavours and sends them through a metal detector,
and then onto the packing hall.
Soon all plastic pots in the UK, like these, will be required
to be more environmentally friendly.
So, what does it take to make ground-breaking plastic pots
that are better for the planet?
Cherry's been finding out.
"Widely recycled."
"Not yet recyclable."
I really do try to do my bit when it comes to recycling.
Absolutely no idea.
But there are so many different plastics used,
knowing what to recycle and how to recycle
can be quite confusing.
It doesn't help that the rules differ depending on where you live.
Currently, we recycle less than half of the 1.5 million tonnes
of plastic packaging we consume every year.
But, from April 2022,
a tax is going to be levied on any plastic packaging
that contains less than 30% recycled plastic.
So, not only do we need to do our bit at home,
but the companies who make the packaging are also going to have
to do their bit to look after the planet.
There is some 100%-recycled plastic food packaging on the market,
but much of the rest still uses a layer of new plastic
to stop the food touching recycled material.
But packaging manufacturer Faerch is making food-safe yogurt pots
with 100% recycled plastic.
Hi, Chris! Nice to meet you!
Site manager Chris Plant is showing me around.
Chris, what have you just had delivered?
So, we've just taken receipt of 27 tonnes of recyclable PET material.
And, essentially, what that is is chopped up water bottles,
food trays that can be regenerated and reused.
What does it look like?
Let's go and have a look. OK.
PET stands for... SHE INHALES
..polyethylene terephthalate.
In layman's terms, it's a type of recyclable plastic.
Gregg's containers are made from 30% recycled PET,
but here they're making yogurt pots from 100% recycled material.
The first step is to heat the shredded confetti-like plastic
to 300 degrees until it melts.
Can I have a look? Yes, you can. Just round here.
Oh, I've got it!
Oh, is that liquid? It is liquid.
And then, as it drops down, it goes through a series of chilled rollers
which takes it from 300 degrees down to ambient,
and therefore you can see the sheet that's produced afterwards.
These sheets made from PET have undergone a process
called super-cleaning, where heat and pressure remove
any contaminating chemicals,
making it safe to put next to food.
The result is the UK's first yogurt pot made from 100% recycled plastic.
So, if that is possible, to make something that is made
of 100% recycled plastic, why not make everything out of that?
The first point is cost,
so the additional processing that needs to happen
takes the cost up of the material.
And the other key point is that there isn't enough
recycled PET material out there
to allow us to move all of the products over to 100% recycled.
Chris, when I'm at home and I'm tired and I'm thinking,
"Can I be bothered to wash this out?"
I will think, "Chris needs this PET."
Thank you very much.
Every little helps.
Back on the production line, our recycled plastic is ready
to be turned into yogurt pots.
So the material is being threaded through,
it's transported through a heating zone, top and bottom,
to the point where we're forming the product.
How many yogurt pots does it create in one hour?
Roughly, about 21,000 pots,
which'll give you about 400,000 in 24 hours.
Do we really eat that much yogurt?
We must do!
And that's for just one variety of yogurt made in Gregg's factory!
Once these pots are formed,
they're slipped into a cardboard sleeve.
Very smart. Look at that.
Is that the first-ever yogurt pot to be 100% from recycled materials?
Yes, it is.
This combination is the first to market.
So...that yogurt pot is a bit of a trailblazer.
Soon, Gregg's multipack will be switching to this kind
of recycled material, too.
There's still a long way to go with plastic food packaging, but...
..this 100%-recycled and recyclable pot
is a step in the right direction,
and I hope that one day, somehow, this little fella will end up
back here, ready to be reborn.
21 hours into production.
At the factory, my four fruity flavours are potted,
sealed, dated and screened,
and they're on their way to the cavernous packing hall.
Mags is showing me around.
OK, Gregg, so we've just been through there,
we've seen our pots filled, and they're now coming down here,
where they're going to be separated into two lanes.
One lane carries raspberry and strawberry,
the other blackcurrant and peach and apricot.
The pots are jostled into position by white screw-like fixtures
called worms.
I can honestly watch this stuff for hours. I love it.
The worms space the pots and sensors signal to robotic arms
that the yogurts are ready for packing.
Then they swoop down, picking up 16 pots at a time,
placing them in their cardboard sleeves
at a rate of 480 a minute.
Absolutely mesmerising.
Are you sure there are four different flavours coming down here?
Absolutely sure.
Cos there seems to be a lot of pink. There is a lot of pink.
However, we have a scanner that side that tells us
that we've got the right flavour in the right pot.
So, raspberry, strawberry, peach and blackcurrant is flowing
down here in absolutely the correct order and the correct time?
Yes. That's outstanding. I can't do that with a fruit salad!
The factory packs one million pots of yogurt every day
and it takes this machine just five hours to box up my batch.
It's a pretty sight, isn't it? It is.
A bit like me.
Once pallets are stacks with 3,840 pots of my yogurts,
they're ready for the 1,400-square-metre chiller...
Come on, Gregg!
Do you want me to push it on? Yes, please.
..where they're stored for six hours at five degrees C
to thicken to the final perfect yogurty consistency.
Very good. Oh, yeah!
Do you know how long I've been working in yogurts? How long?
It's a couple of hours.
23 hours since production started back in the milking parlour,
our pasteurised, potted and packed yogurts
finally make it to factory dispatch.
Is that our truck? Yep.
He's putting the yogurt on the lorry.
So, how many of these trucks are leaving every day?
So, over a 24-hour period, we have 16 lorries leave us
carrying over a million pots of yogurt.
Right, shall we get the last pallet on?
Let's do it. Come on, my friend!
The east of England is home to the nation's biggest yogurt fans,
followed by the Midlands
and southern England.
I like that, you know?
I knew them yogurts when they were still inside the cow.
24 hours after my clumsy milking,
the fruity favourites are on their way
to feed Britain's yogurt-hungry hordes.
I am really impressed.
Honestly, I can't believe how much work goes into making
a pot of yogurt and getting it on the shelf.
I've loved the lot.
Come on, you beauty.
The messy mixing...
Oh...! Watch your...! THEY LAUGH
..and the clever chemistry.
Do you know how many bacteria I'm putting in here?
Every gram will be 100 million.
That's ridiculous, isn't it?
But do you know what really impressed me?
Do you know what I really honestly loved?
It's where it all started - those cows.
COWS MOO