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Inside the Factory

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A look at some of the largest factories in Britain.

Gregg Wallace and Cherry Healey hit factory floors across Britain for a snoop around their supersized production lines. What are the secrets behind our supermarket staples?

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Ruth Goodman

Cherry Healey

Gregg Wallace

Steve Tait

Geraint Lewis

Simon Cross

Rafick Affejee

Chris Titus-King

Rhys Plume

Carlotta Rio

Ian Goff

Michael Wood

Charlie Perara

Matthew Holland

David Blakemore

Richard Coffey

Daisy Fordham

Rachel Drew

Ally Young

Samara Friend

Tim Hansen

Victoria Sankey

John Payazidis

Simon Cheuk Pong Lee

Taylor Richardson

Rob Myler

Phil Stein

Philip Smith

Jenny Midl

Sanjay Singhal

Michael Rees

Amanda Lyon

Inside the Factory: Series 4: Pizza

Factual

Pizza

Series 4

BBC Two - Inside the Factory, Series 4, Pizza

Gregg Wallace is in Italy at a pizza factory.

Gregg Wallace is in Italy at an enormous pizza factory, where they produce 400,000 frozen pizzas each day.

Gregg Wallace is in Italy, at an enormous pizza factory where they produce 400,000 frozen pizzas each day. He mixes up a 450 kilo batch of dough for the bases; enough for 180 000 pizzas. He watches as each one is stretched to exactly 26 centimetres in diameter, then pricked with 522 holes, each 4mm deep, before they’re topped with tomato and disappear into the wood fired oven. It’s 25 metres long and the floor is made of rotating panels of volcanic rock heated to 450 degrees Celsius. Gregg’s pizzas emerge fully cooked after just 80 seconds. They’re topped with cheese, pepperoni, chillies and onions, then frozen and dispatched on their 1000 mile journey to the freezer compartments of British supermarkets.
 
Meanwhile Cherry Healey is asking if mozzarella – the traditional choice for pizzas -  is also the scientific best bet. She finds that not all cheeses are equal, and that to melt well they must sit in a pH zone between 5 and 5.9. This explains why blue cheese and feta don’t work on pizza but mozzarella and gruyere do. In Austria, she transforms 400 kilos of pork into pepperoni. She learns that this preserved sausage is fermented and salted to give it a long shelf life. A production process that takes more than 2 weeks.

Historian Ruth Goodman is investigating the technology that allows frozen foods like pizza to be transported across the globe. 150 years ago we were all 'locavores', eating locally sourced food. But in the 1880s the game-changing invention of freezer ships meant that lamb and beef could be shipped from New Zealand and Australia. Combined with the 1938 arrival of the freezer truck, this created the worldwide cold chain that we rely on today. She also meets the man who popularised pizza in the UK back in 1965 when he opened his first restaurant in London’s Soho.

Inside the Factory: Series 4

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Gregg Wallace and Cherry Healey visit some of the biggest factories in the UK.

Gregg Wallace and Cherry Healey visit some of the UK's biggest factories to follow the relentless 24-hour production lines that produce our favourite products on an epic scale.

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