Original subtitles

♪ MTV ♪

- Tomorrow morning in Britain we will get through

over one-and-a-half million bowls of corn flakes.

[truck rumbling]

- And it all starts with thousands of tons of corn

shipped from around the world.

- Within days it will be on breakfast tables

all over the country,

but how do you manufacture breakfast cereal on this scale?

We've been given access

to the largest cereal factory in Europe to find out.

- I'm Gregg Wallace. Give me crunchy nut!

And I'm going inside to follow this epic production line.

That is fabulous.

I'll reveal the secrets

to ensuring the breakfast cereals

we've all grown up with.

Whoa hot Rice Krispies.

Taste exactly right every time.

And the massive operation.

This scale is unbelievable!

That delivers cereal all over the UK every day.

If I hadn't a just seen that I would not have believed that.

[Paul laughs]

I'm Cherry Healey.

Oh that's the dream.

And I'll find out where special nutrient is added

to our cereal.

- One in five of us are actually deficient in vitamin D.

One in five of us?

And historian Ruth Goodman

looks at what we used to eat to start the day.

- Gammon. - Black pudding.

- We've got a pigs head. - It's hearty.

- It's hearty. - [Ruth laughs]

- In the next 24 hours over a million boxes of cereal

will come out of this one factory.

And we're going to show you how they do it.

Welcome to "Inside the Factory".

[thud]

[upbeat music]

- This is Kellogg's Manchester factory.

It is the largest producer of breakfast cereal in Europe.

And tonight I'm gonna watch closely

as this handful of corn gets transformed

into one of Britain's biggest selling breakfast cereals,

Crunchy Nut corn flakes in less than 24 hours.

It all begins nearly nine-thousand miles away

in Argentina.

Where the corn is grown on farms across an area

the size of the Isle of White.

During harvesting the kernels are stripped from the corn cob.

Then once a month are put onto a ship

bound for the UK.

- After three weeks at sea it arrives here

at the Port of Liverpool with enough corn

to make over half a billion bowls of corn Flakes.

[upbeat music]

At the harbor side corn mill first the kernels are cleaned.

Then the outer skin is removed along with the germ,

the bit that attaches the kernel to the cob.

[bus horn beeps]

That's now on its way to the factory in Manchester

where in a matter of days the contents of that truck

will be the corn flakes on your table.

[truck rumbling]

- The truck full of corn kernels

takes around an hour and twenty minutes

to reach Kellogg's.

Their Manchester factory as big as 18 football fields

is a local landmark.

And the corn flake production line keeps moving

24 hours a day, seven days a week

making a million packets of cereal every single day.

Factory director Tony O'Brian is in charge.

- So this is corn comin' in--

On that wagon.

Over a 24 hour period

we'll bring in about nine or 10 deliveries

and that'll make about seven million bowls of cereal.

- It's a scale I can't possibly imagine,

and I've got a big breakfast bowl

let me tell ya.

And if no corn came in how long would it take

'til Britain ran out of corn flakes?

- Here we've got about 700 ton of corn.

I reckon we've got about two days' worth of.

[Gregg laughs] Is that all?

- From supply. - Is that all we've got?

Then my phone would be going very warm indeed.

- If all goes to plan this precious cargo

will be turned into boxes of cereal in under 24 hours.

[machinery whirring]

Getting it into the factory is the responsibility

of logistics manager Paul Davies.

- And that's naturally gonna lift that up.

- And he's entrusting that job to me.

- So what you're gonna do is you're gonna pull that back.

- Like that? - Yeah.

Then put that shoe

into the ready for delivery for the corn.

I've never done this.

If I get this wrong

I'm gonna waste 20 ton of corn all over the floor.

- You're not gonna get it wrong. - Is that?

- I'm not gonna let you get that wrong.

Thanks.

- Okay? - Okay.

- Now what? - Take this.

Then turn it to open up the slide.

- That's a terrible responsibility I got.

That's it.

The 24 hour count down

from kernels to corn flakes begins.

- That is a corn waterfall a corn avalanche.

- Tomorrow's corn flakes. - Yep.

That's incredible mate.

That is incredible.

[upbeat music]

It takes an hour to pour all those kernels

into the silo store.

They're a good 30 meters away from the factory plant.

But if the silo was any closer

it could be dangerous because although it's rare

grain dust can be highly explosive.

How on earth does it get into there

to make the bowls of cereal?

- It drops from there into an elevator

which takes it up to the top.

It then drops into the silo and gets blown across there

into the plumbing.

- It gets blown over that bridge?

- It does yeah. - No way!

I wouldn't lie to you Gregg I promise.

[upbeat music]

Blowing the kernels over

is the quickest and most efficient way

of transporting them.

It gets madder here by the minute Paul.

- You think so? - Yeah.

The magic begins in the cooking hall.

Fundamentally a massive kitchen

containing 26 super sized pressure cookers.

In charge is head chef or corn unit manager Dan Fox.

- This is the first stage where it starts its process

in becoming a corn flake.

So what do we here essentially we cook the corn.

- The corn is cooked one ton at a time.

Way!

When the hatch is in position.

It's like a little mini submarine.

The press of a button.

- Ready? - Yep.

Signals for the release of the corn kernels.

I can hear 'em. I can hear 'em coming.

All the way from the storage silo

through a 250 meter long pipe.

So you've got a ton of corn in here.

That means by reckoning

we need half a swimming pool full of milk.

And about 30 kilos of sugar.

An hour and five minutes after arriving off the lorry

the corn is sealed inside and ready to steam.

The pressure will reach 20 PSI,

almost twice as high as a household pressure cooker.

- We add to it barley malt, iron, sugar, and salt.

And those natural flavors

help take on this characteristic color.

We add a quarter into that corn.

Swells it out.

That makes it more malleable

which then enables it to be in the right sort of format

to be made into a corn flake.

- I just. It's just. Unfathomable.

The pressure cookers continuously rotate

to make sure the corn cooks evenly.

Can you burn it?

You can't burn it as such

but what you could do is absolutely really ruin it

by overcooking it tremendous.

So a bit like I say if you're cooking pasta

you could overcook the pasta so it just becomes a slop.

- And after one hour and 50 minutes it's ready.

Whoa!

That feels warm and tropical.

- It's just sort of like dark sandy sort of color.

You see it's free flowing

and essentially it's doubled in size.

- The ton of steaming moist hot corn

is whisked away to start drying out.

Are you a bit of a cereal anorak?

[Dan laughs]

- Probably I am actually yes. Secretly yeah.

- How many times have you turned around

and started talking to people about their breakfast cereal?

- To be honest you know quite a lot.

And at times I do it people's eyes do glaze over

I'm not gonna lie to you.

And then my wife says come on wind it up wind it up.

I'm probably a corn flake nerd yeah probably right yeah.

I've just realized something,

I'm cooking breakfast for 30 thousand people.

But not everybody has breakfast.

[upbeat music]

- Almost half of us admit to missing breakfast

at least once a week.

And some people don't eat breakfast at all.

We've all heard the saying

breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

But is it true?

Does it really matter if we give it a miss?

I've come to Leeds University to meet two people

who've researched this very subject.

Professors Louise Dye and Katie Adolphus.

I have to confess I quite often miss breakfast.

To me extra time in bed is always gonna win.

Is it really that bad?

- It is that bad. - [Cherry laughs]

- So basically breakfast does have a short-term

beneficial effect on your cognitive performance

across the morning.

So those that have eaten breakfast

do better on tests of reaction time,

memory, attention

than those who have skipped breakfast.

- Eating breakfast in the morning

actually prevents a decline in cognitive function.

- It's not gonna make me super woman

but it's gonna keep me constant.

With the help of the professors I've set up an experiment

so that I can see the effects

of ignoring breakfast for myself.

It's seven AM the sun hasn't even come up,

but we're here at this Leeds office

and we're waiting for the workers to arrive

'cause they're gonna be our guinea pigs.

Our test subjects are creatives based at a work space hub

and none of them have had breakfast yet.

Before we start the experiment

professor Dye needs a baseline reading

of their cognitive function.

- The first test is a memory test.

The second test is a reaction time test.

And the third test is a sustained attention test.

- Fist the volunteers are shown 16 pictures

and 10 minutes later asked to recall which ones they saw.

Next reactions are assessed

by a black circle appearing on the left

or the right of the screen.

They must respond correctly as soon as they see it.

In the attention test they must press a button

whenever they spot three odd or three even numbers in a row.

- That was really hard! - [Louise laughs]

It was very hard.

And now we will you're in two groups.

So one group will get breakfast and the other I'm afraid won't.

So sorry to break this to you

but team A you don't get any breakfast.

You just get a glass of water.

And team B you get breakfast.

And you can have as much or as little as you like.

Go for it.

But just try not to you know show that lot.

[glasses clinking]

Now all our volunteers need to work as normal.

An hour-and-a-half after the experiment began

and I'm checking in with the water only workers.

Are you a breakfast eater?

- Yes I would've had a massive bowl of porridge

about an hour ago.

- And how are you feelin' right now?

- I'm pretty hungry. Just really distracting.

Has it affected you so far?

- Well we've mainly been looking

at pictures of food on the internet.

- So yeah we're quite distracted I guess.

[women laugh]

- I am a little worried about it.

I'm thinking so much about the fact that I'm hungry

that I'm worried about how well

I would be able to manage this space.

- Two hours in and the professors are retesting

both the control group and the fasting group.

- By this time they've already exerted quite

a lot of effort,

they've been performing all morning,

they've gone back to their desks and carried on working.

So that they should be tiring now.

And we'd expect their performance to be declining.

- So if you're used to having breakfast every day

missing it is likely to be detrimental.

- So when they haven't eaten breakfast

they feel very sluggish,

they feel that they can't focus, not as alert,

and they also feel very frustrated and angry

and quite hard done by that they haven't eaten breakfast.

- I want to see if our hungry group

is finding the test any harder.

The numbers thing

they were dancing at me by about halfway through.

Well.

Yeah the numbers bit

was it was really hard to concentrate.

And by the end I was just kind of felt

like I was in a blur of numbers.

- I'm doing okay a bit of a foggy head.

Just putting numbers together

popping them into triple check everything,

'cause I'm my concentration is a bit shot.

- How much do you think your productivity has been affected?

I think massively so.

Yeah I've done maybe a third of what I could normally do.

[upbeat music]

- Three-and-a-half hours after we started

and after the final test

how did our office workers compare?

The breakfast eaters sailed through all the tasks.

The workers without food did okay on the memory test

but they were four percent slower on reaction times

and a whole six percent behind on the attention test.

So it looks like the experiment has worked.

People who didn't have breakfast

really did struggle with their performance.

Absolutely.

From the studies in our lab

the task that measures attention,

performance is normally seven percent lower

in the breakfast skippers

compared to those who have eaten breakfast.

It's quite a big percentage.

So it doesn't matter if you're a toast or porridge

or a scrambled egg person,

think twice before skipping breakfast.

I know that I will.

[car horn beeping]

[machinery whirring]

[upbeat music]

Back at the cereal factory

and our corn kernels are in the drying room

three hours after they arrived here.

They've soaked up moisture during cooking

so now they're moving slowly on a looped conveyor belt

through this nearly 100 foot long

extremely noisy double deck-er dryer.

Is this the biggest bit of kick in the factory?

- It's probably the single biggest

and long piece of equipment.

That's all dryer.

- Yeah so we star there all the way along, down,

all the way back again.

But it's it probably in the range

of several thousand bowls

just going past your shoulder now.

- You won't ever get closer to this

about a corn flakes ever.

Absolutely.

I'm sure if there was Guinness book of records

over here and we get a bowl big enough

it would be the biggest bowl of corn flakes.

- It takes two-and-a-half hours

of hot air fanning over the corn before it's ready.

What are you looking for?

- That was the corn coming out of your cooker.

Like there you can see

it's got that sort of golden color

and it's got a soft.

- But not wet. - Just squishy.

- And as it goes through the drying process

what we're looking for at the end

is this sort of texture.

So it should be dryer, darker,

but it should be slightly harder.

Yeah. Slight bounce on it.

It's got a little bit of give.

- Yeah and actually that's absolutely critical.

If we dry it too fast or too hard

we're in danger of crushing it into a powder.

- If one stage breaks down what happens?

Everything before it stops.

So it's not just this section that stops,

it's all the 26 tons of cookers beforehand that stop.

That could cost millions.

That's correct yes.

- I can't believe they've given all that responsibility

to somebody like you Dan.

- Sometimes I can't believe it myself Gregg if I'm honest.

[Dan laughs]

- The next stop is the milling room

where our corn kernels still moist in the middle

are about to be transformed into a much more familiar shape.

They roll through that mill.

- What do you mean roll? Squashed?

Imagine a mango.

They share it,

sort of flatten it and elongate it.

- Mate they squash it? - Yeah.

- The kernels are fed between two giant steel rollers

which turn in opposite directions,

one slightly faster than the other.

That means the kernels don't get crushed

but stretched all in a second or less.

Going through here we've got there's 200 bowls a minute.

- They now look like corn flakes to me.

- They might look like corn flakes

but they're not corn flakes yet.

See their feel, feel it.

- You're all right, feel it. - Oh it's wet.

Whoa it's.

- Scrunch it, you can make it into a ball.

Yeah that's not right.

- No. - It's all stretchy.

- And rubbery. - Yeah.

- What have you done to my corn flakes Dan?

- So would you like that in your breakfast bowl

in the morning?

No.

- I'm about to discover how Dan turns my squidgy wet flakes

into the classic crunch we're all familiar with.

But around 150 years ago I wouldn't have had

any kind of corn flakes in my breakfast bowl

because cereal hadn't been invented.

Now Ruth Goodman is finding out

what the Victorian's were eating instead.

[lively music]

- Breakfast before cereal was a gut busting business.

Wow this is quite a spread here.

- Isn't it just? - [Ruth laughs]

- I'm sitting down to a 19th century feast

with Historian Serran Evans Charington.

So what exactly have we got here?

- We'll start off nice little bit of boiled lobster

some langoustines.

We've got meat pies, bacon, cold cuts of meat.

- Gammon. - Gammon, black pudding,

we've got a pigs head filled with jellied brawn.

- It's hearty. - It's hearty. [Ruth laughs]

So your breakfast would change

depending on what you'd have the night before

what was left over.

- One thing I'm really noticing is that

the enormous amount of protein that's on the table.

And the complete lack of fruit.

- Yes but this is really high class dining.

You had a really hearty breakfast

that was going to set you up for the day

and keep you going until you ate again.

We're not thinking about our waistline.

We're not thinking about the nutritional value of it.

And it's thought that this is good for you at this point.

[soft music]

- Even the average Victorian was gorging down a mind boggling

four-and-a-half thousand calories a day.

Almost twice the amount we eat now.

In a modern life if you sat down to this every day

well you'd give yourself

a whole range of health problems.

- They are getting lots of gout,

you've got problems with obesity,

all sorts of gastro intestinal problems.

- Put simply this breakfast made people fat and flatulent.

Things had to change.

So in 1863 an American doctor James Caleb Jackson

came up with an alternative for his patients.

A healthy vegetarian breakfast that he called granular.

And we're going to try and recreate it.

So what we're looking for

is stiff wallpaper paste consistency.

- We're mixing wheat flour and water to make a dough.

We want to bake it

until it's the consistency of a hard brick.

- That's nine hours in a low temperature oven then cooled

and put back in for another nine hours.

So this has been twice baked.

- Oh this is quite hard isn't it?

- Yeah. - It's tough.

Break it up into these little pieces.

We want something like that.

- Yeah but it's hard going flaking it.

- The flakes now need to be ground.

Now that's starting to look much more like a cereal.

But before you want to eat it you've got to soak it overnight.

- After about 30 hours of preparation

a very plain breakfast is served.

Brace yourself.

It's not horrible.

It's not exciting.

Worthy I think is what it tastes like.

That is what it's meant to be.

I can't say it's a food for pleasure.

- I mean it tastes like a health food.

There's no sugar in this, there's no saltiness,

it's just very simple.

Pleasant or not Jackson had invented

the first commercially available breakfast cereal.

It wasn't profitable

but it lead to other health specialists

developing their own varieties.

And this is where the Kellogg story starts.

In 1894 doctor John Kellogg

Chief Medical Officer of a sanatorium,

and his brother William Keith,

were trying to make granola for patients using corn,

oatmeal, and wheat.

One day William Keith was experimenting with wheat grains

and over softened a batch by mistake.

Instead of destroying them

he tried rolling and baking the mushy grains.

And by accident created the wheat flake of today.

And from there it was but a short step

to creating the very first corn flakes.

[corn flakes rustling]

[machinery whirring]

[upbeat music]

Back at Kellogg's factory

corn flakes might still be their most iconic product,

but it's not their only one.

Here they also make chocolate, frosted,

Frosties, and raisin wheat.

And I wanna see what else is cooking.

Technician Paul Richardson

is the man who puts the snap, crackle and pop,

into one of their childhood classics.

I feel a bit silly but I never realized

that Rice Krispies actually were made from rice.

- Well the clue's in the title isn't it?

- What rice is it? - Arborio.

- That's Italian risotto rice, I've got that at home.

Yeah.

After cooking and flavoring

the rice is dried, trimmed, and put aside.

And then it has to be puffed up by hot air.

- On our oven here we have a thousand tubes

it actually puffs it up

so you've got your snap your crackle and your pop.

- So from there to there in about 20 feet

of tubes hot air and color.

Correct.

- I'm gonna get rice to Rice Krispy.

- That's right. - Oh!

As you can see it's hot.

Whoa. Hot Rice Krispies.

If I hadn't a just seen that I would not have believed that.

[Paul laughs]

[upbeat music]

Half the Rice Krispies get extra special treatment.

They're covered in a mixture of cocoa, water, and sugar.

On their way to becoming Coco Pops.

[upbeat music]

Every Kellogg cereal is fortified

with minerals and vitamins.

Most recently in some varieties vitamin D.

Cherry is finding out why we need it added to our breakfast.

- Vitamin D is essential to absorb calcium

for healthy teeth and bones.

But new research suggests

that there are other important benefits.

I've come to St. Bart's and London Center

for immunobiology to meet professor Adrian Martineau.

- For the last 10 years we've been working

on the effects of vitamin D on the immune system.

And particular on resistance to the common cold.

So what did you discover?

- We've done clinical trials and the results have shown

in people who have low vitamin D levels to start with

giving them extra vitamin D supplement

can reduce the risk of getting a cold by around 50 percent.

That's absolutely huge.

So if you have low vitamin D levels

topping them up can potentially prevent you

from getting the common cold by up to 50 percent?

Exactly right.

[upbeat music]

- It's not just colds you risk if you're low in vitamin D.

Serious conditions from type one diabetes to some cancers,

as well as children developing bone softening rickets

have been linked to severe vitamin D deficiency.

One way we can get this super nutrient is sunshine.

We can produce it by our skin converting ultraviolet light.

So if we spend plenty of time outdoors

then surely we'll get enough of it.

Not in the short days of winter

according to nutritionist Angelique Panagos.

- So the sun actually has to be at a certain angle,

so it has to be about 50 degrees above the horizon.

And that way the UVB rays

can actually penetrate through the atmosphere

and help us to synthesize vitamin D.

- But in the UK the sun in winter is always very low.

The sun's unfortunately it's letting us down.

So from about October through to April

we can't synthesize vitamin D.

So if you live in the UK

and you go out into the sunshine in winter

you're not really getting a vitamin D benefit.

- You're not getting the vitamin D benefit.

- Although we store the vitamin D

we make in the summer

it can be depleted over the winter.

Research has shown that one in five of us

are actually deficient in vitamin D.

- One in five of us? - One in five.

That's enough to make me

want to get my own levels checked.

So I'm using a self-testing kit.

If 10 million people are vitamin D deficient

then there's quite a good chance that I am too.

But there's only one way to find out.

Two weeks later my results are back.

Now it's time to find out

if I'm one of the 20 percent of the population

that is deficient in this sunshine vitamin.

Adequate.

That's not good. Adequate.

- Good excuse to go on more holidays.

Okay. [Cherry laughs]

So my vitamin D levels at the moment are okay,

but what happens if they dip.

What can I eat to keep them topped up?

- So you can get some vitamin D from food sources.

So oily fish is a good one,

but you'd need to be eating a lot of one food

to be getting that vitamin D kick

that we're looking for.

- To get my 10 microgram daily dose

I would need to eat either one fresh salmon filet

or six eggs or eight homemade beef burgers,

52 bacon rations, or 333 fried mushrooms.

Taking a vitamin D supplement would be easier.

And having a boost at breakfast could also help.

The sunshine vitamin is put into a range of cereals

voluntarily by Kellogg's

and most other cereal manufacturers.

Providing a tenth of the recommended daily allowance.

[machinery whirring]

[upbeat music]

At the mega cereal factory

our corn kernels have reached the toasting area.

It's five hours and 36 minutes since they entered the factory.

And they're halfway to becoming a bowl

of proper corn flakes.

Wow.

Now those soggy flattened flakes need crisping up.

- Then here you dry it and toast it.

- That's a circular rotating toaster?

In simple terms yes, it's.

Taking the moist flake and making it crispy.

- Yes and as it rotates around there

the rotation action separates the real flakes out.

There might be gooey flake

becomes separate like crispy ones.

Absolutely yes.

[upbeat music]

It's in there for about seven to 10 seconds.

- Oh! - Yeah.

- That is the fastest cereal I've ever seen.

Yes.

- Incredibly these corn flakes are coming through

at a rate of 10 bowls a second.

Help yourself take it.

- They're hot. - They are hot yeah.

- It's like a plate of hot chips.

Hey have you ever thought about selling hot corn flakes?

- Well it's a treat not many people get to experience.

You won't get a fresher corn flake than that.

The Corn flakes are good to go.

Great big river of corn flakes.

- That's right they're corn flakes were equal-er,

we can turn them into Crunchy Nut corn flakes

or Frosties.

- Really? - Really, yes.

- So right now there could be any one of three?

Any one of three yes.

- Five hours 36 minutes and 15 seconds in

and the plain Corn flakes head off for packing.

While Frosties is diverted away for extra flavoring

along with Crunchy Nut,

which was invented here right at the factory.

I'd love to make Crunchy Nut.

How do you stop them going up to corn flakes?

- I'll make a phone call. - Can I make that phone call?

Here one second.

No way.

Is that Steve?

Steve can we divert some to Crunchy Nut?

Give me Crunchy Nut, go Crunchy Nut, do it Steve.

Yay!

- Corn flakes up that way, Crunchy Nut down that way.

Am I going there next?

- You'll be going there very shortly yes.

- I'm becoming very fond of you Dan.

Well I think it's mutual.

It's five hours 39 minutes

since the raw corn kernels were delivered.

I'm now in the coating room

where my ordinary corn flakes are about to be crunchy nutted.

So these peanuts are nuts you put on the Crunchy Nut?

- Yes they come from the America's.

We take them as whole peanuts

then we slice them through and you get that.

- How do you stick the nuts to the corn flake?

- We use honey from the America's again,

molasses, sugar, and vitamins.

It's like a syrup to form of glue.

- Why don't you use British honey?

- We haven't got anything against British honey.

We need consistent supply 365 days a year.

Good?

Of course it's good,

it's a corn flake nuts and honey.

Yeah.

- Every 24 hours the factory mixes together

10 tons of nuts, three tons of honey,

and two tons of molasses, a sweet syrup.

On the biggest scale.

In this drum here is your base corn flake,

then you're adding your honey your molasses your sugar

your bit of a profile and your nuts all in there,

they're spinning around and being coated in that drum.

- The sweet molasses and honey glue plus sugar

mean there's just over two-and-a-half of sugar

in your average bowl of Crunchy Nut.

Obviously it's gotta dry up now a little bit hasn't it?

That's right.

So at the minute you can see it's shiny and it's hot.

So what happens now is it goes through drying process

and then it's done dry Crunchy Nut corn flake

that you're used to.

My Crunchy Nut corn flakes

have reached the packing area of the factory.

Just over six hours since they came here as corn kernels.

First stop is the weighing room.

So every click you here

is a bag of Crunchy Nut corn flakes being weighed out

to form a perfect 500 gram packet.

It's like a chorus of metal frogs.

Gives you a really clear indication

of how fast you're making 'em.

It's not as simple as each hopper

separately weighing out 500 grams of Corn flakes.

- Each of these metal pan contains a weight

somewhere between 100 maybe up to 200 grams of food.

So for example that pan might have 100 grams in it,

that might have 200 grams in it, that might have 203,

and that one might have sort of 98.

What the computer program does

it says there's eight tons there

all with various different weights.

It selects the best combination

of those weights in your pans to give you the 500 grams.

- That is a stupid system. - [Dan laughs]

- That just confuses everything.

Why don't you just weigh out a box worth in one hopper?

Because every corn flake

every corn flake is slightly different.

So to get an exact weight on the product

is very, very difficult.

[light music]

Each precise combination of corn flakes

drops directly into a bag

which is heat sealed bottom and top.

To prevent any defective bags getting through

they go past a sensor that measures them exactly.

- Right on the blue box here it's a bit like a laser beam.

That laser beam detects the correct length of that bag.

So the bags first it's easy to see that length

and that will be rejected.

- You're a good teacher you know that?

Thanks very much.

[upbeat music]

Over in the packaging department,

cardboard is being turned

from flat pack into boxes in one slick move.

The machine even opens each box as it goes.

That's genius.

Six hours and three minutes ago

each one of these Crunchy Nut corn flakes

was a plain little kernel of corn.

Now to make sure they're all as perfect as they should be

Jim Karney in quality control

carries out a random check every two hours.

How long you been doing this Jim?

A long time, 42 years.

42 years?

If you do find a problem

does that mean you have to stop the whole batch?

Depends on the defect.

If it's minor then we can make an adjustment accordingly.

If it's possible holes then we stop the line

and we tell relevancy provision.

- So how many boxes of cereal we likely to throw away?

Probably about 10,000.

- Wow that can't happen very often.

Hopefully not, but it does happen.

- It does happen? - Yes.

- There's a detailed check list but Jimmy is so experienced

he knows in an instant if there's a problem.

Smell the inside of the box.

You do what?

- You smell the inside of the box.

[Gregg laughs]

And what can you smell from the inside of a box Jim?

- Well it's hard to describe, it's through experience,

but there's sometimes the cardboard itself

can actually taste or smell off.

Then we have to report it.

- You know like a wine buff has a perfect nose,

can you honestly stick your nose over a box

and tell me if it's wrong or not?

Yes.

- Really? - Yes.

- So okay and once we've done the box

then what are we looking for?

- Right. [plastic rustling]

Make sure there's a good seal.

That seems fine.

We pour the contents into this bowl here.

- Feel it. - And feel it against this?

- Yes your standard batch of Crunchy Nut.

- That's your template if you like?

Yes. We're looking for similarity.

Actually lighter or darker.

Too much coating or not enough coating.

And then I have a taste.

- [cereal crunching] - Can I?

Yeah by all means.

Your peanuts, the syrup, the honey.

And then we go to the rough-ins and try that one.

- To me it's fine. - Jim I believe you.

You have got an expert nose

when it comes to breakfast cereal.

- Thank you. - [Gregg laughs]

The humble cereal's come

a long way in the last 100 years.

But the most important development came in the 1950's

when admin realized that the secret weapon

in selling a box of cereal wasn't the cereal.

It was the box itself.

[upbeat music]

- We in Britain eat more breakfast cereal

than any other nation in Europe.

In fact 87 percent of British adults

sit down to a bowl every day.

[light instrumental music]

Back in the first half of the twentieth century

eating cereal had already become well established.

But it was the 1950's that sealed the deal

for our love affair with cereal.

They're great!

- I want to find out what triggered

the start of cereal domination after the war

from advertising guru Robin Wright.

Rationing. Disappeared.

The sugar coated product arrived and kids gobble them up.

And then at the same time almost television arrived

with television advertising promoting these new products.

[light instrumental music]

- The other game changer for cereal companies

was a crucial shift in family dynamics.

- The power of what I call the tyrant child emerge.

[Ruth laughs]

There was a shift to recognize the power of children.

They were the big consumers.

[light music]

- Advertisers responded by inventing pester power.

- Dood-L-Oon you get me free.

And me.

- Not only were we showing the brand

to a child very early on

we were then using what's now called loyalty marketing

so the respectable taste they'd like to have the toy,

they'd like to play games on the side of the pack.

All these things are unfurled in Britain

and British kids, and I was one of them, really loved it.

It was fun it was great.

Of course while we were enjoying it

these brands were embedded in our brains.

So even now all those years later,

what's my favorite cereal?

It's Weetabix.

- Cereal is the only food on the menu

at one London cafe owned by Gary and Alan Keery.

So I went to find out

why it's still so appealing to adults.

I don't think I have ever seen so many cereals

[Ruth laughs] all in one place.

It's quite astounding isn't it?

I mean what is so special about cereal?

- Well for us it was when we were kids

it was the first thing that we fell in love with.

We remember going to the supermarket

and given that choice once a week

to buy a cereal that you had to eat

for the rest of the week.

And it was the biggest responsibility you had.

So do you think that cereals

are really just a childhood thing?

I think everything is all about nostalgia these days.

People like to feel like a kid again,

even though they're not.

- We always used to in the mornings

like turn over the cereal box and used to do like the little

puzzles on the back.

Oh yeah.

- We had to pour out the whole cereal get the toy.

- And nostalgia certainly seems to pay.

The six top sellers in the UK today

were all invented more than 30 years ago.

Some ad campaigns have barely changed

since the successes of the 1950's.

And they're still as effective now as they were back then.

- I don't know I love Cocoa Puffs.

Snap, Crackle, and Pop.

- Snap, Crackle, and Pop. - Snap, Crackle, and Pop.

[girl with braids laughs]

- The cereal industry has never stopped growing.

And in the UK it's now worth

around one point five seven billion pounds.

[machinery whirring]

[upbeat music]

- At the factory, the final stage

of our Crunchy Nut production line is the distribution area.

Nearly six-and-a-half hours

since the start of their journey here

my corn flakes are boxed up

and traveling just under three kilometers from packing.

And over the sky bridge to the warehouse.

Now urgent orders for UK supermarkets

are dispatched straight away.

While cereal destined for Europe and the Middle East

is stored awaiting shipping.

The warehouse supervisor is Jeff Bolton.

How many boxes you holding in here do you know?

About quarter of a million.

About 10 percent of what we produce.

- So the ones that go to our UK shops they don't sit around.

No.

- No they go straight out the door.

- Straight onto trucks. - They're straight out the door.

This scale is unbelievable.

[upbeat music]

Every box of Crunchy Nut cartons has been given a bar code

so it can be scanned into the system

before getting some top to toe plastic protection.

[Gregg laughs] Yay!

This is the wrapping machine.

All those Crunchy Nut cartons

is going to get wrapped to stabilization.

- We all need those for our suitcase

when we go on holiday.

- It's gonna come forward it's gonna get labeled.

- Yeah you I'm not standing--

- No you're not gonna get labeled

but I'd watch your back 'cause of the vehicle coming for ya.

What's happening?

I don't feel safe anymore what's happening?

- There's gonna be a vehicle coming to collect this.

- 22 sophisticated robot shuttles do all the lifting.

Eight white ones collect the boxes

and take them to the loading bay or hand them to the 14 red ones

which shelf them ready for dispatch.

I mean how do they work?

Top of the vehicle we've got a laser spinning round

it's got a computer inside the truck,

we've got some computer in the control room

and that's where it's getting this position from.

So it always find their own position.

- It also knows where to take it?

- It knows where it's going to, where it's picking,

what it's doing.

All automated, programmed by buffings.

- And do the white ones hand over to the red ones?

- At the end of the conveyor the red one's will pick 'em up.

And the red ones look after the warehousing?

- The red ones look after the warehousing the storage.

- Do they ever won you over a game of cricket?

- Nope. - They won't mix.

- They won't mix. - They won't mix.

[Gregg laughs]

Do you know what?

I used to see sci-fi films about this

when I was a little kid.

- [Jeff laughs] Think so did I.

The computer is capable

of simultaneously tracking all 25,000 cartons

heading for Europe and beyond.

How many humans are there here?

- Well I have three operators and one craftsman

looking after the whole process in here.

- Four people and a team of robots?

Four people, team of robots.

- That is unbelievable, that is remarkable.

Million boxes of cereal a day.

Wow. Wow.

For the past six hours and 40 minutes

I've followed corn kernels

through a hugely ambitious mega machine process.

They've been cooked, squashed and stretched,

toasted, and covered in honey and nuts.

That's it that's the last pallet

[Gregg claps hands] let's get this truck loaded.

Those Crunchy Nut corn flakes

could be delivered to supermarkets

within 24 hours of being raw corn.

Yorkshire and Humberside

are the biggest cereal eaters in Britain.

But they'll also be sent to Europe

and all over the world as far away as Asia.

The scale of this production is very impressive,

but what really amazes me

is the lengths these people go to,

they're taking natural product.

It's corn, honey, and nuts.

They bend them and they shape them

and condition them until they give us

the exact same cereal

every single time bowl after bowl after bowl,

millions of times.

That is impressive.