Browse all episodes of Inside the Factory

Gregg Wallace, Cherry Healey and Ruth Goodman look at the production, science and history of bread in Britain.

Bread

Gregg Wallace, Cherry Healey and Ruth Goodman look at Britain's love of chocolate and visit one of the world's largest chocolate factories in York.

Chocolate

Gregg Wallace, Cherry Healey and Ruth Goodman look at Britain's history with milk and visit one of the largest fresh milk processing plants on earth.

Milk

Gregg Wallace receives a load of corn fresh off the boat from Argentina and follows its journey through the largest breakfast cereal factory in Europe.

Cereal

Gregg Wallace follows 27 tonnes of potatoes from a farm in Hampshire through the largest crisp factory on earth.

Crisps

Gregg Wallace helps to unload 27 tonnes of dried haricot beans and follows them on a journey through the world's largest baked bean factory.

Baked Beans

Gregg Wallace visits Britain's largest bicycle factory, which produces 150 folding bikes every day, and joins a production line to make his own bike.

Bicycles

Gregg Wallace helps to unload a tanker full of sugar from Norfolk and follows it through one of the oldest sweet factories in Britain.

Sweets

Gregg Wallace visits the UK's largest sports shoe factory to see how they produce 3,500 pairs of trainers every day.

Shoes

Gregg Wallace receives some tea leaves from Kenya and follows them through the factory that produces one quarter of all the tea drunk in Britain.

Tea Bags

Gregg Wallace is at the world's largest dried pasta factory in Italy, where they produce 150,000 kilometres of spaghetti each day.

Pasta

Gregg Wallace follows the production of chocolate digestives and discovers that we are all eating them the wrong way up.

Biscuits

Gregg Wallace explores the Grimsby factory that processes 165 tonnes of fish a week and produces 80,000 cod fish fingers every day.

Fish Fingers

Ruth Goodman investigates the origin of Worcestershire sauce, as told by Mr Lea and Mr Perrins.

Sauces

Gregg Wallace explores Ribena's Gloucestershire factory. Meanwhile, Cherry Healey is in the lab figuring out why fizzy drinks are so appealing.

Soft Drinks

How a factory in Derbyshire produces 175,000 jars of instant coffee every day, from green coffee beans to the freeze-dried final product. How roasting alters the chemical composition of coffee. How caffeine affects the body and brain. How climate change is affecting coffee harvests worldwide, and the coffee species that could cope with warmer growing conditions. The history of instant coffee going back to the American Civil War. How passion for coffee led to the founding of the Stock Exchange, auction houses and newspapers.

Coffee

How a factory in Manchester produces 700,000 toilet rolls a day starting with spruce timber offcuts from Sweden, pulped and rolled onto 1.2-tonne 'mother reels'. How the water treatment works of Brighton remove debris, grease and bacteria to produce clean water in little more than an hour. How a high-tech Japanese toilet addresses hygiene. How waterless toilets could improve sanitation for one-third of the world's population. The history of the modern flush toilet.

Toilet Roll

How a factory in North Yorkshire produces 625,000 sausages a day, using machines that can fill 600 sausages in a minute. How low and slow shallow frying delivers the best combination of flavour, moistness and succulence. How veggie protein is created from a tiny speck of natural fungus. How a 'meat sock' is the secret to wrapping a Scotch Egg every three seconds. How German bratwurst became top dog in America, and how German immigrant Charles Feltman originated the hot dog. Cooking up a 2,000-year-old recipe for sausages. How the Romans contributed by importing pepper, bay leaves and other spices that spike modern sausages.

Sausages

How a factory in Nottinghamshire produces 250,000 jars of curry sauce each day. How chillies are harvested on small farms in India, dried, packed down, and processed into chilli powder. How four rules for cooking rice guarantee it will come out right every time. Recreating a 1747 recipe for rabbit curry. How a British Asian housewife brought restaurant curries closer to Indian home cooking.

Curry

How a factory in Lowestoft produces 450 tonnes of frozen food each day. The differences between waxy and floury potatoes, and which you should use for which job. How the potato's nutritional value compares to other fruits and vegetables. The history of potatoes is traced to Spanish explorers and an enterprising French chemist called Parmentier, who popularised the exotic new vegetable. How Mr Whippy ice creams inspired the potato waffle, a teatime treat.

Potato Waffles

How a factory in Italy produces 400,000 frozen pizzas each day. The science that makes mozzarella work so well on pizza. How pork is transformed into pepperoni. How freezer ships and trucks create the worldwide cold chain that enables this business to exist. How pizza was first popularised by a restaurant in London’s Soho in 1965

Pizza

How Britain's biggest brewery produces 3 million pints of beer a day in Burton upon Trent. How four basic ingredients – water, malted barley, hops and yeast – are manipulated to make dark, heavy ales; light, fragrant lagers; and everything in between. How the hard water of Burton – perfect for brewing flavourful stouts and porters – and its position on the canal network made it the centre of brewing in 19th-century Britain. How beer-making turned from a predominantly female cottage industry to an industrialised process dominated by men.

Beer

Gregg Wallace is in Germany at a historic pencil factory where they produce 600,000 writing implements a day. Cherry Healey examines the astonishing properties of graphite. Historian Ruth Goodman traces the origin of pencils to a 15th-century graphite discovery in the Borrowdale valley.

Pencils

How a cheese factory in Gateshead produces 3,000 tonnes of spreadable cheese every year - making cheddar, chopping and blending it with whey, water, and other ingredients. How bacteria affect the aroma, flavour and appearance of cheeses. How to make perfect cheese on toast. How cheddar became the predominant hard cheese world wide. How Kraft made processed cheese 100 years ago.

Cheese

How a factory in Stoke-on-Trent produces 250,000 little cherry bakewell tarts every day - from what makes a shortcrust pastry 'short' to the team of 12 precisely placing the cherry on top of every one by hand. How to swerve a soggy pastry bottom when baking pies and tarts at home. How almonds are roasted and milled into almond butter ready for toast. The origin story of frangipane, the fragrant almond filling used in cherry bakewell. How the modern cherry bakewell actually descends from a mistake.

Cherry Bakewells

How a factory in South Shields produces 650 water-resistant waxed jackets a day - from 500-metre-long rolls of undyed cotton, to dipping the finished fabric into baths of heated wax, to assembling each jacket from 23 pieces. How a breathable membrane is key to allowing sweat to get out while keeping water from getting in. How a simple wooden stick is transformed into a top-notch umbrella using saws, pliers, and needle and thread - techniques barely changed in 150 years. The history of seamen adapting oil-covered sail cloth into garments.

Wax Jackets

How a factory in France produces 336,000 croissants every day - from the 21 tonnes of butter, to the 83-year-old strain of yeast that packs a flavourful punch, to the layering of very thin slices of butter between sheets of dough to create the famously flaky texture. How croissants are best served - and eaten. How 'concentrated' butter produced in north Wales enhances the shelf life of croissants. The history of the croissant, thought to originate from 17th-century Austria, and emerging in its modern French form as late as 1906. How bread played a vital role in the French Revolution.

Croissants

How a factory in Leeds produces 600 bouncy beds every day - from making steel into springs, to their placement in individual pockets and covering in natural fibres like hemp and wool designed to wick away sweat. How a short, twenty-minute sleep improves reaction times. How wool is shorn from sheep, and its inherent anti-bacterial and fire-retardant properties that make it well suited to mattresses. How the modern spring mattress evolved. How a famous Scandinavian-inspired home store is responsible for popularizing the duvet.

Mattresses

How a bakery in Cornwall produces 180,000 Cornish pasties a day. There are rules: A Cornish pasty must be made in Cornwall; the filling can only contain onion, potato, swede, beef and some seasoning; and each ingredient must be cooked from raw within the pastry parcel. The versatility of onions, and how they make us cry. How anaerobic digestion turns food factory waste into electricity. Challenging the pasty's origin story. How importation of pepper eventually transformed it from a precious commodity to a spice that everyone could afford.

Pasties

How a foundry in France produces a cast iron pot every five seconds - from the arrival of 20 tonnes of crude iron right through to brightly coloured orange casserole dishes. How a South African iron ore mine - one of the largest in the world - produces a staggering 670,000 tonnes every day. The science behind cooking the perfect casserole - more cooking time isn't always better. The history of one-pot cooking to prepare simple meals, from communal ovens to 1970s slow cookers. How casting iron in sand moulds democratised the kitchen through affordable cookware.

Pots and Pans

How a factory in Wigan produces two million tins of soup a day. Vegetable soup is followed from a pea harvest in Yorkshire right through to the finished soup going into cans and being dispatched. How the vitamin content of frozen vegetables can greatly exceed that of fresh. How a spinach soup based on a 17th-century recipe doesn't much resemble soup as we know it today.  The history of the soup kitchen.

Soup

How a factory in Ireland produces 540,000 bottles of liqueurs a day. From grain, to barrel aging, to mixing cream and whiskey together, the show traces the production of a cream liqueur over the span of three years. How Ireland’s bottles and jars are recycled at a plant processing 500 tonnes every day. How all alcoholic drinks - not just aperitifs - stimulate appetite. The rules for producing and labelling whiskey, bourbon, and blends. How monks invented liqueurs. The impact of modern distillation methods on traditionally made alcohols like Irish whiskey.

Liqueurs

How a factory in Essex produces 400,000 cereal bars a day - from nuts to cranberries and sultanas to puffed rice, with a carefully balanced blend of honey and glucose binding it all together for the ideal texture. How macadamia nuts are harvested in South Africa, and shelled under extraordinary pressure. The scientific distinction between botanical nuts, legumes and drupes. The history of Britain's cereal bars, including one Kendal Mint Cake snack bar made popular by famous explorers Ernest Shackleton and Sir Edmund Hillary.

Cereal Bars

How the world's biggest cider producer makes more than 350 million litres each year - from orchards in Herefordshire, to the mill in Ledbury, to fermentation and bottling at the factory. How grafting is used to create a new sweet apple variety called Scrumptious. How a by-product of making cider - CO2 - is used to make fire extinguishers. The history of the Victorian apple-breeding boom, and recreating one of Queen Victoria's favourite baked apple desserts.

Cider

How a Leicester factory makes one and a half million socks annually. What causes smelly feet, and which socks tackle it best. How a cotton spinner in Manchester produces 4,200 miles of yarn every hour. A revolutionary eco-cotton supplier. The history of 1980s sock fashion, and how the 'Kitchener stitch' helped save the feet of British soldiers in the trenches during the Great War.

Socks

How one million pots of yoghurt are produced every 24 hours in rural Somerset - from the Friesian cows that provide the milk to the processing, culturing, and packing processes. How blackcurrant are harvested. Plant-based alternatives to milk. Food-safe yoghurt pots made from 100% recycled material. The history of the electric milk float and the contentious origins of the cream tea.

Yoghurt

How Woodmansterne produces 35 million greeting cards a year in Watford - from sketching a card design, to creating an aluminium plate for printing, to guillotining the sheets into cards and the final shipping process. Creating a vegan Christmas feast. The history of the year Christmas was cancelled.

Christmas Cards

How JCB make as many as a hundred iconic yellow diggers every single day in Rocester, Staffordshire, requiring just 45 hours to make a digger from scratch, and consuming 650 tonnes of steel, 170,000 bolts, 5,000 litres of paint and 236 miles of wiring each week.

Diggers

How the largest malt loaf factory in the world makes the sweet and squidgy cake-cum-bread, a popular teatime treat consumed at the rate of 130 million a year. How a British baking company cooked up the first business computer. How wheat flour was ground the traditional way, until the Victorians' demand for white bread brought about the demise of Britain's iconic windmills.

Malt Loaf

Gregg Wallace visits the Ercol factory in Buckinghamshire to follow the production of a Windsor chair. Cherry Healey investigates how sitting too much could be very bad for our health. Historian Ruth Goodman discovers how utility furniture made during the Blitz is still influencing the designs we buy today.

Chairs

Gregg Wallace visits a bootmaking factory in Wollaston, Northamptonshire to follow the production of a pair of Dr. Martens, while Cherry Healey gets to grips with the machines that make shoelaces.

Leather Boots

How the biggest tortilla factory in Europe makes 60,000 tonnes of snacks every year in Coventry, including their UK bestseller: chilli heatwave flavour tortilla chips. Tasting the hottest chilli in the world at the UK's largest chilli farm. The science behind the UK's first compostable crisp packet. How the Elizabethans kept their huge ruff collars standing to attention, and how American popcorn became a box office smash.

Tortilla Chips

How Denby - potterymaker since 1809 - produces one of their best sellers, the Halo Heritage mug, in Derbyshire. The journey starts at the factory's 100-metre-long, 100,000-tonne mound of clay.

Mugs

How a family-run factory in rural Aberdeenshire churns out fifty thousand litres of dairy ice cream every day. How best to stop 'brain freeze.' How sprinkles are made. How ice cream vans made soft whip a favourite on Britain's streets.

Ice Cream

How a 32-acre site in Somerset makes 1.2 million Henry vacuum cleaners every year.

Vacuums

How Alstom builds a 187-tonne, five-carriage electric train on their 84-acre site in Derby. How the train's aluminium is made at the UK's last remaining smelter in Scotland. How tunnel boring machines are digging ten miles through the hills for the new HS2 line. The history of the UK’s first electric train - Brighton's seafront tourist train, still used today - and how that technology went on to be used in underground transportation all over the world.

Trains

How London's famous red double-decker bus - including a fully electric model - is built in Scarborough, Yorkshire, highlighting the tough laminated heated windscreens and bright red coat of paint. How the turbines at an offshore wind farm convert wind into watts. The history of London's earliest double-deckers and their vital role in the First World War.

Buses

How a factory in Manchester churns out 6 million Jaffa Cakes every single day - 1.4 billion per year. The legal significance of whether Jaffa Cakes are cakes or biscuits.

Jaffa Cakes

How Vale of Mowbray make pork pies - including 425,000 a week of their 75g snack-sized traditional pie - in Northallerton, Yorkshire. Hacks for the perfect vegan shortcrust pastry. How piccalilli, a pork pie accompaniment, is made. The history of Britain's unusual stargazy pie, and powdered egg during the Second World War.

Pork Pies

How a factory makes 432 million classic British crumpets every year from a precise combination of ingredients, using some clever chemistry to create their famous 'holey' texture. The science of making the perfect pancake batter. How another British favourite, Eccles cakes, are made in Manchester for shipment all over the world. The history of how crumpets got their rise and eventually their bubbles, and Britain's obsession with toasting baked goods.

Crumpets

The futuristic process by which Heck churn out up to 90,000 vegan sausages a day in Yorkshire. How Canadian soy beans are transformed into protein-packed tofu. How a vegan superfood of the sea is harvested on the Scottish coast. The history of the vegetarian movement in Britain, and the high price that British sailors paid when deprived of their five a day.

Vegan Sausages

Gregg Wallace explores the Ambrosia factory in Lifton, Devon, to reveal how it makes up to 360,000 rice puddings every single day. How fresh water from the Alps is used to grow more than a million tonnes of rice every year in Italy's Po Valley. The history of school dinners.

Rice Pudding

How Polos produce 32 million mints every day in York - part of the 19,000 tonnes of mints consumed every year in the UK. The largest sugar beet factory in Europe. How one of the last surviving peppermint farms in the UK harvest their crop. How clever marketing persuaded people to buy minty mouthwash.

Mints

How Aunt Bessie's produce a staggering 500 million Yorkshire puddings every year in Hull. How wheat is tested before it can be milled into flour. How to cook the perfect gravy for a Sunday roast. The history of the roast dinner, and the art of washing up Tudor-style.

Yorkshire Puddings

How Jelly Bean Factory make ten million of their colourful little sweets every day in Dublin. The important role glucose plays in our bodies. How one of the ingredients in jelly beans plays a key role in the production of lipstick. The history of jelly and post-war pick'n'mix.

Jelly Beans

How denim cloth is made, and how Welsh jeans brand Hiut transform it into one of the world's most popular items of clothing - jeans. How zippers are made. How denim is distressed to make a new pair of jeans look old, in environmentally friendly ways. The little-known person who helped shape the design of jeans forever. The history of indigo dye.

Jeans

How Dell Ugo make 500 million stuffed pasta parcels every year in Hertfordshire. How Cromer on the Norfolk coast still use traditional fishing techniques to catch the crab for stuffed pasta. How Italian immigrants in Bedford helped to build Britain. The origins of gluten-free food.

Stuffed Pasta

How Guinness make two million litres of Irish stout every single day. How reservoir water is treated to provide clean drinking water to the people of Dublin, as well as to the stout brewery. How hops are harvested at a farm in Worcestershire. The history of Irish pubs, and how pub games helped the Allies in the Second World War.

Stout

How Lush produce an astonishing 14 million bath bombs every year in Dorset. How taking a hot bath can provide some of the benefits of exercise. How a lab grows human skin for cosmetic testing. The notion that complex perfumes ward off the plague. How the living conditions of coal miners and their families were transformed by the introduction of communal showers.

Bath Bombs

How Axminster produces 46,000 square metres of carpet every year in Devon. The science behind the best ways to remove stubborn stains from carpets such as butter, milk and red wine. How the groundbreaking methods of a Devon-based carpet maker in the 18th century revolutionised intricate carpet making. The rise and fall of the hard-wearing flooring linoleum.

Carpets

How Nestle make more than eight million bars of chocolate every day in York - the UK's city of chocolate. How a cocoa plant quarantine facility in the Berkshire countryside is preventing a worldwide chocolate shortage. The bitter history of drinking chocolate.

Chocolate Bars

How HSL make more than 5,000 sofas every year in West Yorkshire. The science of light bulbs, to create the perfect environment to snuggle up on the sofa. How foam padding is produced. The history of the sofa. One of the world's most famous sewing machines.

Sofas

How Farrow & Ball produce up to 200,000 litres of paint and 10,000 metres of wallpaper a week in Dorset. How a key ingredient in paint-making is mined in Devon. The art of hanging wallpaper, and its history. How ships in the First World War were painted with dazzling patterns to evade German submarines.

Paint and Wallpaper

Gregg Wallace and Cherry Healey get exclusive access to some of the largest factories in Britain to reveal the secrets behind production on an epic scale.

All Episodes of Inside the Factory

Browse all episodes of Inside the Factory

Season 1

Bread

Season 1 Episode 1 - Aired 5/5/2015

Chocolate

Season 1 Episode 2 - Aired 5/6/2015

Milk

Season 1 Episode 3 - Aired 5/7/2015