Original subtitles

♪ MTV ♪

[bright upbeat music]

♪ ♪

- We eat more baked beans in Britain

than anywhere else on earth.

- Every day, we consume over two million cans of them.

- That takes hundreds of sacks of beans like this.

- Tonight, we're going to tell the truly extraordinary story

behind an ordinary can of beans.

By taking you inside

the biggest food factory in Europe!

I'm Gregg Wallace.

That's a tin of beans, innit?

And I'll be revealing the secrets

of this astonishing production line.

A billion beans is gonna go through here,

and the laser is gonna look at every single bean!

And the science behind the magic.

That is mega strong! That's quite incredible.

That is simply that with ripples in it.

Turning a humble little bean

into one of the 300,000 tons of baked beans we eat every year.

Mate, what it takes to give us beans on toast, eh?

- [fire roars] - [upbeat music]

I'm Cherry Healey.

I'll show you the incredible journey

your recycled tin goes on

in order to make it back to your pantry.

God, it's so hot.

Bits of it are just falling off as it rolls away.

- Historian Ruth Goodman discovers that

tin food was once a matter of life and death.

Malnutrition had killed

more than half of the British seamen.

♪ ♪

- Three million cans of baked beans

will roll out of this one factory

in the next 24 hours.

- And this is the incredible story

of how they do it.

- Welcome to "Inside the Factory."

- [bike wheel spins] - [wrench clinks]

[conveyor clicks along]

[machine whirs]

[chips crunch]

[conveyor whirs]

[cereal clatters]

[words thud]

- [upbeat music] - [conveyor whirs]

[upbeat music]

This is the Heinz factory in Wigan.

It works around the clock with 1,200 staff

to make 200 different products,

including spaghetti, soup,

and its biggest seller, baked beans.

They come in all sorts of varieties and containers

like plastic resealable jars

and individual portion pots for the microwave.

But tonight, we're making the traditional best seller,

baked beans in a can.

♪ ♪

Each bean will go on an incredible

mile and half journey through this factory

before they are packaged and ready to head

to your local supermarket less 24 hours later.

♪ ♪

The factory in Wigan is enormous,

covering 54 acres,

five times the size of Wembley Stadium.

It's the largest food processing plant in Europe

and the biggest baked bean factory on the planet.

Bringing in the beans

is ingredients inspector, John Brady.

Right, John, that's it! That's our load of beans, yeah?

- Yep. - First one of the morning?

- Yep. - Come on then.

[grunts]

How many of these come in every day?

- About 20. - Right.

I'll move to the back. Come on then.

Let's have a look at is.

I did not expect that.

I don't know why. I just didn't expect that.

How many of those big bags on there?

- 10 in total, two ton in weight.

- 10 two-ton bags of beans.

Driver! We're ready.

- [upbeat music] - [truck hums]

Overseeing the arrival of the beans

is operations manager Gary Dent.

- We typically take in 12 to 14 containers a day.

We'll do 50,000 ton a year.

But when you consider

we'll make over three million cans of beans a day,

that's why we need so many beans.

- Three million cans of beans a day.

Oh yeah, easy. Yeah.

- Three million cans of beans rolling out of here?

In 20, yes.

- Forgive me, but what bean is in a tin of beans?

- That's them, Gregg, the haricot beans.

- I really love it that we eat so many of these,

yet we probably don't know their name.

We probably don't know what they are.

- No. These are haricot beans.

- Haricot beans start life in a pod.

[soft bright music]

They grow throughout the summer months

and left to dry on the plant.

The beans I'm following come from North America,

where the climate provides the perfect growing conditions.

Every week, 1,000 tons of beans are loaded into containers

and shipped to the Port of Liverpool.

Then they're trucked the final 20 miles here to the factory.

[truck hums]

- So these little things. - Yeah.

- How long roughly before they become a tin of beans?

- You could see a finished tin of beans within two hours.

- I suppose it is possible for me

to see every single stage of this process, isn't it?

It certainly is, Gregg.

Maybe taste a few at the end?

Oh, without doubt.

[upbeat music]

- The bags of beans are brought out of their shipping containers

and into the factory at bean intake.

[timer beeping]

This is where the baked bean production line begins.

In just 24 hours, these beans could be in a can

on a supermarket shelf.

Each two-ton bag is carefully positioned above a funnel.

When the bag is opened,

the beans drop onto an enclosed conveyor that takes them

to the first stage of processing.

- Could I have a go at that? - Certainly.

Don't go anywhere, Gary,

'cause if it falls over, I'm blaming you.

[machinery whirs]

Each bag contains

nine and a half million individual beans,

enough to fill more than 20,000 cans.

♪ ♪

- That's a lot of beans to drop, Gregg.

Whoa.

That's a bit tense, that, Gary.

- Yeah. - All right, now pull that.

- [dramatic music] - [beans clatter]

- There they go. - Yay!

[beans clatter]

My dry beans are traveling to the blanching room,

which is 200 meters away from the intake area,

to prevent contamination from the outside world.

They move at five miles an hour on an enclosed conveyor,

and it takes five minutes for the first beans to arrive.

Here, there'll be rehydrated.

- Okay, Gregg, we're now gonna see

how we rehydrate our dried beans.

What we've got here is the dried beans

that you loaded up for us about five minutes ago.

They've now reached the blancher,

and this is where we put the water

back into that dry bean.

[up-tempo music]

In the blanching process,

they pass through two 85-degrees Celsius,

steam-heated chambers,

each soaking the beans for 10 minutes.

- Time and temperature are key in rehydration process.

♪ ♪

- Blanching in steam quickly softens the outside

of the dry bean and lets in water.

That's the before and after.

- They've swollen up incredibly.

- Yeah. - But not cooked.

Not cooked.

If you want to try one, you can,

but they're certainly not cooked.

It's just got a bit of give, but in the middle,

it's as hard as, like, an uncooked risotto.

Yeah.

- I quite like 'em. You got any salt?

The rehydrated beans are washed in warm water

to get rid of any loose skins.

- Finally, the laser sorter actually

detects any discolored beans

and rejects them with an air jet.

- [Gregg laughs] - Honestly, yeah.

- Really? - Yes.

Really? Okay, go on then.

- 20 years ago, there would be people flicking the beans up

with spoons, but now we use a laser sorter.

[bright upbeat electronic music]

♪ ♪

There are two lasers,

one above and one below the beans,

that examine them from every angle.

A laser spots a discolored bean and fires an air jet

that knocks it off the production line.

- The puffing noise that you hear is the gun firing,

knocking the beans off.

- Every one of those little clicks is a jet of air?

- Yeah, exactly. - And a bean dying?

Bean being rejected.

- A has-bean. - A has-bean. Very good.

- Within the next couple of hours,

these will be in a can ready to head to a supermarket.

- [bright cheery music] - [fork clinks]

[fork clinks]

Mm.

This tin of baked beans is about to go

on an incredible journey.

Not the beans, I've just finished those,

but the tin itself will go through

an extraordinary process to end up back

in someone else's cupboard.

It all begins the moment

you throw it in the recycling bin.

[can thuds]

Did I just get that in?

In most major cities,

you can throw all of your recycling into one bag,

but how is it all sorted to make sure

that my tin can ends up in the right place?

You do it with one of these,

what's lovingly known as the MRF,

Materials Recovery Facility,

and it's one of the largest of its kind in the world.

[up-tempo lively music]

At this recycling center in East London,

their MRF sorts 520 truckloads every week.

My guide through it all is David Rumble.

Wow. That is a monster machine.

It looks like teeth grinding everything.

What is this actually doing?

- Well, this is actually separating out

into three different sizes, very big,

which just rolls over the top, medium size,

which is where steel can goes, and then very small,

which is broken glass and shredded paper.

There it goes, your can.

- There it is. There it is. - You see it there?

- Once it's all separated into different sizes,

it moves on to be sorted by shape.

Flat objects like paper and cardboard

travel along the top of the wheels

while the rest, including my can, drop through

and are collected at the bottom.

So it's a matter of surface area.

Absolutely, yes.

Surface area and physics.

Now that it's been sorted by size and shape,

it needs some high-tech equipment

to separate it further.

- This is the near-infrared optical separator,

and what this is doing is taking plastic off of the belt.

So we're actually pulling out EET,

which is the clear plastic drinks bottles.

- A sensor in the separator detects

how much light is passing through

or reflecting off the different materials.

So it can spot the clear plastic bottles,

and they get blown off the belt.

Can it really be that detailed

that it can see an individual bottle?

Absolutely.

- Finally, my steel can is picked up

and separated from the aluminum drinks cans.

This is an electro magnet that will lift the can

off of the belt, move it over above a beam,

and then drop it off.

- So once the tin has been dropped by the magnet,

where does it go then?

It goes to the bailer

where we make it into a big square bail

with ferrous metal.

- The bailing machine crushes up to 40,000 tin cans

into one single cube, each weighing one ton.

- [soft electronic music] - [forklift hums]

This one includes my can.

- [machinery whirs] - [cans clatter]

[bright jaunty music]

Back at the factory,

it's been 25 minutes since my dry beans arrived,

and now they've been rehydrated.

To make baked beans,

every manufacturer uses haricot beans,

but they all create their own particular tomato sauce.

Here at Heinz, their special ingredients

are prepared in the spice mixing area.

The recipe is classified information,

and making sure it stays that way

is manufacturing coordinator Paul Sherrington.

- This is where we make up the secret spices

what makes the beans famous.

- What do you mean the secret spices?

- Secret. No one knows.

Only two people in the world know about these spices.

- Who do you think you are, James Bond?

- Yes. [chuckles] - Mate, get out of here!

The ingredients are listed on the label of a can of beans,

but because no recipe could be copyrighted,

the exact proportions they use are a trade secret

known only by the head buyer and the chief quality officer.

The secret spice recipe has stayed the same since 1896

and is delivered to the factory as three anonymous powder mixes.

- What are they? - I don't know.

You honestly don't know what they are?

Honestly, I don't know.

I can taste these, though, can't I?

- 'Cause I. - Indeed, yes, yes.

- I might be able to work out what's in it.

- But if you do that, we'll have to kill ya.

Surely working out

what's in the three different mixes shouldn't be too hard.

Oh!

They're so strong.

You got a salty one, a pepper chili one,

and a sweet garlicky one.

Do you know what I conclude from that?

- I haven't got a clue. - [laughs] Not at all.

- Paul doesn't know the exact ingredients,

but he does know how much of each mix

to measure out for our bag of spices.

What quantity of tomato are we gonna add this to?

- We're gonna add it to a batch, which is five ton in weight.

- And how many tins will that make roughly?

Approximately 20,000.

- 20,000 from this little bag? - Yes.

- No wonder my lips were tingling.

[bright jaunty music]

I'm taking my bag of secret spices next door

to the sauce room

where sauce operator Peter Foster

is ready to mix up a batch.

- Hello, mate! - Oh, hello, Gregg!

Lovely to see ya.

- I've got some spice. - Right.

- What is this room? - It's the sauce room.

You control the spice.

- Control the bulk, the water, boilers.

You're the chef.

Well, you could say so.

- Peter is in charge of eight mixing bowls,

each one holding enough sauce for 20,000 tins of beans.

♪ ♪

- There's you're tomato puree. - Oh!

♪ ♪

Then I add my bag of spices.

This is just like adding a stock cube at home.

With a press of a button,

Peter adds starch to thicken the sauce.

The sugar and salt are blown through pipes into the mixer,

then some vinegar, but they won't tell me how much.

It's a secret.

And finally, it's all blended in the giant food mixer.

Don't you think it might be a little bit too technical

for an old-fashioned tin of beans?

- We make the best beans, so that's what we do.

- After 15 minutes, the sauce is ready.

♪ ♪

That's a tin of beans, innit?

That's a tin of beans.

- Our tomato sauce is on its way to get mixed with the beans.

Next, we're gonna need some cans.

They can make up to four million baked bean cans

in this factory every day and for that,

you need a lot of steel.

- [upbeat music] - [vehicle rumbles]

- I followed my old tin can from the recycling plant

to Tata Steel in Port Talbot, Wales.

This is the largest steel works in the UK.

In six hours, my can will be part

of a brand new sheet of steel.

- [flames roar] - [dramatic music]

♪ ♪

Here, scrap metal makes up over a quarter

of the finished steel.

And so my old, recycled tin can

is about to be combined with this raw iron ore.

[dramatic music]

It's been mined from rocks as far away as Australia.

To make steel, the iron ore is tipped into a blast furnace,

mixed with a type of coal called coke,

and heated to over 2,000 degrees.

The result is almost pure molten iron,

which is poured into brick-lined steel vessels

called torpedoes and shunted across the yard

to the most incredible place I've ever set foot in.

♪ ♪

That is absolutely unbelievable.

♪ ♪

Here, my tin can, along with the rest of the scrap metal,

is being loaded into a huge skip.

Tim Rutter talks me through the process.

Two things are gonna happen.

Firstly, the scrap metal is gonna come along

- and be charged into the mouth. - Which is there?

- Which is coming down the bay as we speak.

So that's scrap metal,

and how much scrap metal is in there?

So there's anywhere between 50 and 100 tons of scrap metal,

so maybe the equivalent of up

to two million steel cans will be in that charging vessel.

- Whoa, so my tin can could potentially be in there,

and that scrap metal is gonna go

into the mouth of the cauldron, and what is over there?

- So here you can see the ladle full of molten iron.

So we've just come from the blast furnace

where that's been made.

It's now in a ladle, and that's ready to charge

on top of the scrap in the steel-making vessel.

- [dramatic whimsical music] - [machine rumbles]

- From behind the safety of a concrete wall,

we can watch the action.

First, the scrap metal is tipped into the 12-meter-high cauldron.

♪ ♪

The whole building is shaking.

♪ ♪

Then, 300 tons of molten iron is poured on top.

♪ ♪

Wow.

♪ ♪

Finally, pure oxygen is pumped in at supersonic speed.

[flames roar]

Carbon and other impurities turn into a gas,

leaving behind the steel we need to make cans.

How many tins of baked beans am I looking at right now?

- If you estimate that we're making about 320 tons of steel,

then that maybe makes about, let's say, eight million cans.

Eight million cans.

[whimsical dramatic music]

The new steel is poured into a water-cooled mold

to reduce the temperature and turn it

into a slab that weighs around 30 tons.

God, it's so hot

that bits of it are just falling off as in rolls away.

That is absolutely amazing!

Before the slab of steel can be made into a baked bean can,

it needs to be a lot thinner.

So it enters this kilometer- and-a-half-long hall

to be compressed.

♪ ♪

It passes through a series of rollers,

exerting almost 4,000 tons of force,

which make it longer and thinner.

Oh wow! So it's being rolled up into a huge coil.

You really feel that intense heat.

The steel is constantly cooled with water,

and it's at a temperature

just low enough to hold its shape.

A second set of rollers transforms

60 meter-long coil

into a kilometer-long length of sheet steel.

♪ ♪

That sheet steel is moving at an unbelievable speed.

30 to 40 miles an hour.

Five minutes later,

the steel is coiled up for the last time.

♪ ♪

- It starts off with a slab that's about ten meters long,

and by the time we squashed it down

to two millimeters thick,

that is about one kilometer of steel.

♪ ♪

- Once it's rolled up into that amazingly neat roll,

where does it go next?

- So the next place for this coil to go

will be our sister plant in Trostre

who's gonna cold roll it to make it even thinner

and coat it with tin before they pass it on

to Heinz, our customer, to make baked bean cans.

- So this product is still steel,

and later on, it becomes a tin can.

- Well, people call it a tin can, but of course,

it's a steel can that's got a coating of tin on it.

It seems unfair.

Okay, I'll call it a steel can from now on.

Okay, excellent.

[soft dramatic music]

- Coating the steel can with tin

creates a barrier to stop air, water,

and beans touching the surface of the steel.

♪ ♪

It prevents the can from rusting

and will protect the beans inside.

♪ ♪

Finally, the coated steel is cut into sheets

and trucked off to the factory in Wigan,

where it could find its way

to your kitchen cupboard within a few days.

So next time you open your tin of beans,

spare a thought for the unbelievable engineering

that's gone into making it.

[fire rumbles]

[water splashes]

[dramatic music]

- Back at the factory, it's been 45 minutes

since my dried haricot beans arrived.

They've been blanched to rehydrate them,

and my tomato sauce has been mixed.

Now I need something to put it all in.

Heinz have their own can-making factory here on site.

Every day, 168 tons of steel arrives,

enough to make more than five million cans.

The engineer in charge is Darren Maloney.

So we buy the sheet steel in one-meter-square sheets,

approximately.

- The sheets of steel are fed into a machine

that cuts them into strips.

- So we slit that way into long strips.

Then we slit it this way into the final blank.

- Wow! - That's cut into 16 of those.

- How many tins will that now make?

Two.

♪ ♪

The transfer system collects them,

takes 'em to the welding machine.

- It's taking about 100 at once!

- It's taking more than 100. It's taking 240 at a time.

- It's like one of those fun fair games...

The gripper.

- where you have to grab the toy.

In a fraction of a second, each steel strip is bent round

to form a cylinder with the edges overlapping

by just half a millimeter.

In a process called resistance welding,

two electrodes heat up the steel edges,

melting them and joining them together.

Heats it up, sticks it together. - Yes.

- It's now the right shape for a can,

but it's big enough to make two.

[upbeat music]

So the cylinders travel across the room on conveyors

and into a machine which finally turns into a can.

- So this part of the kit rotates.

It basically splits it in two.

So go like that.

Yeah.

Rips it up.

That doesn't seem anywhere as strong as a finished tin can.

I can't do that with my can of beans.

We put the ripples on the can to make the can strong.

If we didn't do that,

you'd end up where the cans would just squash.

The ripples give it the strength.

- So the next machine rotates the can around a mold

that creates ripples on its body.

These help to keep the can rigid

to prevent it collapsing under pressure.

You can feel the difference.

- Yeah, that's sturdy. That's quite incredible.

That is simply that with ripples in it.

Yes.

- And then over there, it's putting the tops on.

- Yep. It's putting the tops on the bottom of the can.

- Circular steel can ends arrive at the factory ready-made.

[machinery whirs]

They're dropped on top of one end of the can,

and the ages are folded over to make a seal.

This happens over 1,000 times a minute,

and now they're off on their way to be filled.

[dramatic music]

In the early 19th century,

food preservation was a matter of life and death.

For all of the military might of both the British

and the French navies, the question of food

was playing on the minds of the warring admirals.

Malnutrition had killed more than half of the British seamen

in the previous Seven Years' War,

so solving this problem was imperative.

To find out what was going wrong with the naval diet,

I'm aboard the Gannett, a Victorian naval ship,

to meet historian Alex Patterson.

Could you tell me why on Earth

were all his men suffering malnutrition?

Surely they loaded the ships up with supplies before they left.

- Fresh food stocks would dry, spoil very quickly.

So you were left with the bare bones,

which was the dried food products.

Dried fruit products didn't have that much nutrition in them.

Coupled with, you know, lack of fresh water,

the men weren't getting what they needed.

It wasn't a great diet to be at sea

four, five months at a time.

- Away without vitamin C for months,

the sailors were prone to diseases like scurvy,

suffering muscle and joint pain, red rashes, and swelling gums.

Do you think they were actually going hungry,

or is it the quality of the nutrition

that's the problem?

- Potentially a bit of both, actually.

The quality of the nutrition wasn't great.

We know that, and if foods spoiled quicker

than they could've controlled it,

they would've had to lessen the rations.

So to be able to feed four to 800 men on board

was a huge feat that the Navy really struggled with.

- [soft pleasant music] - [seagulls cawing]

Across the channel,

the French Navy faced the same problem.

In 1795, they offered a cash prize to the first person

to find a new method of food preservation.

♪ ♪

The winner was Nicholas Appert.

He found that, by heating food inside glass bottles

and sealing them up with a plug of cream cheese and slate lime,

he could preserve food almost indefinitely.

The British quickly jumped on the bandwagon,

coming up with their own version.

Looking for a less fragile material,

they turned to their already established industry, tinplate.

Author John Nutting has made a replica of their solution.

Why change from glass bottles to tin cans?

- Well, glass bottles were fragile,

so you didn't want really to have to use something

which was not particularly good at resisting knocks

and bashes and all the sort of things

that would happen to preserve foods on ships.

[soft upbeat music]

- The innovator who made the first successful tin cans

for preservation was a man called Bryan Donkin.

He set up the first tin canning factory

in the world in London,

and the principles of counting he pioneered

are still the same today.

So food goes in there.

First, he filled the can with food

through a hole in the top.

- So now what we have to do is cover that hole--

- Right. - And solder that on.

Okie doke.

Then added a lid with a much smaller hole.

So now we've got everything closed except

for one tiny little hole.

When he cooked the food inside the can,

steam could escape through the hole,

but it was then sealed up,

preserving the food inside the can.

And that's it. So now the food in there is cooked.

All the bacteria are killed, and because it's now sealed,

no new bacteria can get in.

Exactly, yes.

And it's preserved with all its nutritional

and vitamin values intact.

That's the key part of it

that your nutritional value is completely preserved, yes.

[bright upbeat music]

So the tin can was born.

By 1818, Donkin's factory was supplying the Navy

with almost 24,000 cans a year,

including soup, meat, and vegetables,

all rich in vitamins and minerals.

The nutrition of the British seamen was hugely improved,

and this humble invention saved thousands of lives.

- [upbeat music] - [machinery whirs]

- Back in Wigan, my three vital ingredients

are being brought together for the first time

in the filling hole.

The beans and dropping down from blanching,

tomato sauce is coming from the kitchen next door,

and the cans are traveling from can making

on the other side of the site.

I'm following them to meet filling operator Jason Lowe.

- This is the starts the process, Gregg.

We'll get the cans from can making,

they come down the gantry,

and they go straight into the bean end.

- The blanched beans arrive at the rotating bean head

and fill up the small round compartments on top.

Then they drop into the waiting cans below.

On average, 465 beans into every can.

It all happens so fast,

I'll just have to take their word for it.

So you don't add the tomato sauce yet?

- No, the tomato sauce is in the next step.

- Can I see the sauce go in? - Yeah, of course you can.

This is what we call a sauce filler.

Happens at a rapid pace, my friend, doesn't it?

Endless sauce being put on.

The cans are passing at such a rapid rate

that the sauce has to be squirted in at high pressure.

- After the sauce, you've got the beans in the can,

the sauce in the can, then it puts the lid on.

[upbeat music]

Here in filling,

the can ends are stacked into a machine by hand.

Whatever you do, don't drop it,

or else you'll end up with all them can ends everywhere.

[machinery whirs]

Yay!

♪ ♪

Finally, the cans are sealed.

But I've just realized. The beans haven't been cooked!

They're not cooked yet, are they?

- No, them are not cooked yet. Them beans are blanched.

They get cooked further down.

- Inside the tin? - Inside the tin.

The beans and the sauce are cooked together in a sealed tin?

Yes.

Does that sound right to you?

That's our process, Gregg.

Who knew that?

No one would ever dream that those beans

go into that can uncooked.

Cooking them once they're in the can kills any bacteria

that might be inside, preserving the contents,

and Cherry's been finding out exactly

how long tin food will last.

[bright upbeat guitar music]

- If you're anything like me, tins are bought

for a rainy day, and then they end up

at the back of the cupboard, gathering dust.

But how long can they sit there and still okay to eat?

If they're past their best before date,

they can still be used as long as they're not dented,

punctured, swollen, or rusty.

But is canned food as nutritious as fresh?

To find out,

I'm going to the Health and Life Sciences Department

at the University of Coventry.

First, I've brought them a tin of tomatoes

14 months past its best before date.

Dietician Carla Phillips is going to measure

the amount of vitamin C in the tinned tomatoes

and compare that to fresh ones.

- We've got some fresh tomatoes here.

So we need to blend them down,

and then we can extract the vitamin C.

Here we go.

♪ ♪

[laughs]

Scientist Andrew Reed puts our tinned

and fresh samples into a liquid chromatographer

to separate and measure that vitamin C levels.

So the results show that the fresh tomatoes

that we bought today have the same vitamin C level

as the tinned tomatoes.

- What? I'm completely gobsmacked.

- Well, we can explain that because these

would've been tinned as soon as they were picked,

and these fresh tomatoes might have been hanging around

in a warehouse before they went to the supermarket,

so the vitamin C content will degrade

from these fresh products.

- So canning preserves the nutrients,

whereas in fresh food, they continually degrade.

Next, the lab has found another can to test.

It's slightly out of date.

["Stayin' Alive" plays]

- What? - 45-year-old can of skippers.

♪ Stayin' alive ♪

Ooh, it comes with a key.

- I think you put. - Yeah.

- That bit in there. - I think so.

- These fish haven't been out of bed

- for 45 years. - I know. Absolutely.

- Theoretically, there's no limit

on how long fish can be kept nutritionally sound in a can.

That is absolutely incredible.

They look fresh, they smell fresh.

But what I would like to know

is are there any hidden microbes in them?

We shall find out.

- To see if the fish is still safe to eat,

microbiologist Dr. Daniel Hammond

places samples on Petri dishes

that need to be incubated for microbe testing.

The results will take five days.

As a dietician, would you recommend cans?

Absolutely.

They're a great way of helping us to meet

our nutritional requirements.

You know, if we buy fresh fruit and vegetables,

then they can stay in our fridge,

and if we don't use them up quick enough,

then the nutrients can become less over time.

But tinned vegetables will really keep the nutrition

locked in for longer.

- So fresh is wonderful if eaten quickly,

but cans are a fantastic way of getting good food

into our body very conveniently.

Absolutely.

["Stayin' Alive"]

And the old tin of skippers,

after a sample was incubated in a Petri dish for five days,

it showed no signs of bacterial growth.

So remarkably, after 45 years, the fish is fit to eat.

♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin' alive, stayin' alive ♪

- But before you eat any food from out of date cans,

make sure the can is intact and in good condition

and the contents look and smell okay.

[machinery hisses and whirs]

- [dramatic music] - [timer beeps]

- Back at the factory, it's been 52 minutes

since I released my beans from the bag.

They've already been blanched and sealed inside the can.

Now it's finally time to cook them.

[machinery hisses]

Just like a household pressure cooker,

steam is used to raise the pressure

and the temperature inside the cooking chamber.

There are five chambers in each cooker,

and inside each one is a giant corkscrew,

which continuously turns,

moving the cans from one end of the chamber to the other.

The movement mixes the beans and sauce inside the can,

and the heat from the steam cooks them.

Seven minutes later,

they move on to the next chamber.

So what we do is we send it up one way,

transfer it, and send it all the way back,

transfer it again, send it all the way back up this end.

- Why don't you just make a great, big pot of beans

and sauce, cook it up, stick it in a can?

- Well, we can't guarantee that there won't be bacteria

in that product when it cooked it up,

and we're sealing that bacteria in a can

and close the spoiled product or dangerous product

on the other side of the process.

- 21 minutes at a high temperature

and pressure kills any bacteria inside the can.

That means the beans will be good to eat

for at least the next 16 months.

That's why it's perfectly preserved.

That is the beauty of canning.

It controls bacteria.

[dramatic music]

So it turns out that baked beans aren't actually baked after all.

They're cooked using steam.

Mate, what it takes to give us beans on toast, eh?

- [timer beeps] - [tense music]

In just one hour and 27 minutes,

my beans have been blanched, laser checked,

put in a can, covered in tomato sauce,

and sent spiraling through a pressure cooker.

They've been cooked with the lid already sealed on,

so every two hours, a team of experts take a can

off the production line and taste it,

checking the texture of the beans

and the flavor of the sauce.

As soon as my beans get the green light,

it's time to put a label on them.

Today, that's Hayley Wright's job.

There's a hole in the wall where the cooker is,

and they come straight through to you?

- Yeah. - How many?

- We package over three million a day.

- These are still really warm. - They are warm.

These are straight from the cooker.

This is the way that we normally label them.

A machine sprays each can

with a mist of glue and sticks on a label.

It's all carefully monitored.

- The light that you can see shining

is actually a camera.

That is taking a photograph

of every single label that's applied.

- That's to make sure that every label

has been stuck on straight.

Are my beans finally ready to go?

They're almost ready to go.

We just need to do a couple more quality checks.

- You're kidding me. - No.

I'll just show you one over here.

- Listen, they're cooked! They're in the can!

They're gonna be okay!

- Let me just show you our final quality check.

So we need to ensure that the beans has got a vacuum.

What we mean by a vacuum is that the end

is actually in a concave.

So if you feel that,

it's a nice tight vacuum that's in the can.

- If a can gets knocked or dented,

creating a hole, the vacuum will be broken,

and the bottom of the can will bulge outwards.

Luckily, the factory have a way of preventing

any of those from getting through.

Right.

I've opened that just a little bit, right?

Yep.

- And now I'm gonna push the lid down

- so the machine can't tell. - Yep.

- That looks like a sealed can, right?

Correct.

- But you reckon now the bottom will have changed?

Yes.

- I'm gonna make a little scrape in it, all right?

That ours.

- Put it back in the machine. - Okay.

- The can passes through a sensor,

which checks its bottom.

Even the smallest bulge would indicate

there's a leak in the can, and it would be rejected.

[laughs] That's ridiculous!

That's not the neatest,

but that is in the top three neatest things I've seen today.

- [Hayley laughs] - [upbeat music]

My finished can has been labeled.

Next, it's wrapped and stacked onto a pallet

by two dancing robots.

[dramatic music]

But before the cans are sent out to the supermarket,

they pass through the factory's national distribution center.

Almost all Heinz products made at their UK factories

are stored here.

As well as beans, soup,

and spaghetti made at this factory,

the warehouse will also store everything

from tomato ketchup to salad cream.

Paul Andrews is head of logistics

for this mammoth operation.

Oh my world. What on earth?

It's amazing, isn't it?

That's just breathtaking.

In this warehouse here,

we can store 70,000 pallets of product.

Imagine, on each pallet, there's roughly 100 cases.

- This is one of the largest food storage sites in the UK.

It's warm in here. Do you heat this warehouse?

No, we don't need to at all.

Yeah, these beans that will come in here today,

they're still warm from the factory,

so actually, all the heat from the product

is heating the warehouse here.

No way.

The heat I can feel,

because this is markedly warmer than out there,

is just the heat from the cooked beans?

- It's just the heat from the cooked beans.

- Is anybody driving those cranes?

- These cranes are all automatic.

[machinery whirs and beeps]

This is just food on a giant scale.

That's what it takes to feed the nation.

[lift whines]

Just two hours ago, I was hoisting my bag of beans

into place and releasing them into the factory.

Now they are under the control

of these giant cranes.

The pallets of cans are stored in the warehouse for 17 hours

while final quality tests are completed

before being rolled out, ready for departure.

Take it out and stick it on a lorry.

Off it goes.

- All of these coming past me are all going to shops,

a constant conveyor belt into our kitchens.

- Into your kitchens. - Never ending.

[pleasant upbeat music]

They make three million cans

of baked beans here every single day.

But then when you think about it,

there's hardly a kitchen in the whole country

that hasn't got a tin of beans in it.

It's the only product I know that we would happily eat

for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

What I didn't realize is the incredible technology

that goes into making

such an inexpensive but everyday item.

I suppose, in a way, it's quite fitting

that the country that eats the most baked beans

also has the biggest baked bean factory on earth.

Beans made at this factory in Wigan

will go to homes all over the UK

with the Northwest taking the crown

for the biggest bean eaters.

They also head to Ireland and Europe,

in fact, all over the world, as far away as Nigeria,

India, and Australia,

who eat more baked beans

than any other country outside the UK.

Last one?

- Yeah. - All done?

Thanks, mate. Thank you very much.

♪ ♪

There, 3,000 tins of beans on that lorry,

and I saw those beans come in dried from North America.

But who knows?

In a few days, someone might be dipping their chips into 'em.

Okay, let's go!

Bean and gone.