Original subtitles

Whether it's ordering pudding from the canteen...

Thank you very much.

- ..or using a recipe passed down by your nan...

More cream, I think.

- ..there's something irresistible

about a sweet and creamy rice pudding.

In the UK, we love this combination of soft rice and sweet milk so much,

we spend an incredible £100 million on it every year.

And the best place to see how it's made -

a factory that produces 23 million cans of it every year.

I'm Gregg Wallace...

Brilliant!

..and tonight, I'll be following the journey that rice pudding makes

from grain...

I really want to cook this now.

I'm fascinated by this.

..to towering tins...

- No, no, not that one.

- It's like a massive game of Jenga.

..and production at super speed.

How many cans are we filling up every minute?

- 500 cans per minute.

- I love this! What a revelation!

- I'm Cherry Healey, and I'm in Italy finding out how rice is grown

using water fresh from the Alps.

- And historian Ruth Goodman...

- So who's ready for lunch, then?

- No! - Yes!

- ..is serving up the history of school dinners.

- Oh!

- Up to 360,000 rice puddings are made in this factory every single day,

and I'm going to reveal just how they do it.

Welcome to Inside The Factory.

This is the Ambrosia factory in Lifton, Devon,

where they've been making rice pudding since 1937.

They also produce porridge, chocolate mousse, and custards.

But today, I'm learning how they make one of their bestsellers,

the 400 gram tin of original rice pudding.

And the clue to the main ingredient is in the name,

so I'm heading to intake to meet general manager Rachel Matheson.

Rachel? Gregg. - Good morning, Gregg.

- I'm guessing, I'm guessing this is rice, right?

- It certainly is.

All 26 tonnes of it.

Each bag contains a tonne, and round about 50 million grains of rice.

- Hang on, hang on, hang on.

A tonne of rice is how many grains?

- 50 million. - About 50 million? Right, OK.

So 26 one-tonne bags on there.

How many cans of rice does a one-tonne bag make?

- Around about 26,000.

- Wow.

As the forklift starts unloading my 1.3 billion grains of rice,

pudding production begins.

I'd like to be able to get a handful of that. Is that possible?

- Yeah. We can open a bag.

- Yeah! Come on, let's have a look at this.

Where is this from?

- This rice is from Italy.

- Ah!

I would have guessed that it came from Asia.

- No, Italy, Gregg.

- So what type of rice have we got?

- So this is short grain pudding rice,

ideal for making rice pudding, because it releases the starch

at a lower temperature and gives you that lovely sticky texture.

- Short grained is a generic description for many varieties

of rice. These starchy and sticky rices are perfect for sushi, risotto,

and, of course, rice pudding.

So that differs from long grain rice,

like that we'd have with our curry, right?

Because that doesn't really slow the starch. - Exactly right.

- Are you able to tell me how the starch gets released?

I mean, I'm useless at science.

- Well, Gregg, all plants store their energy in starch,

which is essentially glucose molecules stacked up

one on top of each other.

And as this rice is cooked, it seeps out of the rice grain

and into the liquid, and makes the milk nice and creamy.

And the rice itself gets nice and sticky

and makes a lovely rice pudding.

- What's making that thick and sticky

is the starch coming out of this little fella?

- Indeed.

- Now, I'm fascinated by this.

Right, what happens to it now?

- We'll need some milk.

So if you head off now, Mark is waiting for you.

- Mark the Milk. - Mark the Milk.

- Thank you.

It'll take an hour for my delivery to be unloaded,

so that will give me plenty of time to find Mark the Milk.

We may associate rice-growing with China or India,

but this short grain rice comes from Italy.

Cherry's been finding out how it's grown.

- I've seen flooded paddy fields like this in Asia,

but I had absolutely no idea that rice is grown in Europe as well.

Whether it's short, medium, or long grained,

there are thousands of different varieties of rice,

with 510 million tonnes produced worldwide every year.

And here in the Po Valley, in the shadow of the Italian Alps,

they produce a mountain of the stuff,

more than one million tonnes a year.

That's nearly half of Europe's rice production.

So what makes this place so good for cultivating rice?

To find out, I'm meeting Giordano Ferraris.

Is it time to put the wellies on?

- Si. - Si?

He works on one of the 4,000 or more small farms cultivating rice

in this region, growing four different varieties,

including short grained pudding rice.

It's the warm climate and abundant meltwater

that's key to rice production here.

The water from the Alps runs through a system of canals

180km long to get to the farm.

Woohoo! OK.

Then farmers like Giordano use a levee system...

That's one.

..to control the flow of water around their rice fields.

Worldwide, around 164 million hectares of land is used

to grow rice, most of it farmed in flooded paddy fields like this.

Rice has been growing this waterlogged way...

Ugh!

..for thousands of years.

Hang on. Wait.

Because whilst the lack of sunlight and oxygen suppress weed growth...

Ah!

..rice plants actually thrive in these aquatic conditions.

Oh!

At the top of each mature stem is the panicle,

where the seeds of the plant grow.

These are the grains of rice.

How many grains of rice on average would a plant like this produce?

1,000 grains of rice just from this one plant?

With 200 hectares to farm here,

they produce more than 1,500 tonnes of rice every year.

Six months after planting, the rice is fully grown,

and the water is drained from the fields.

From September to November, the rice grain is harvested

by stripping it from the plant.

It's then sent down the road to this mill,

where they process up to ten tonnes of grain every hour.

And on the factory floor,

I'm meeting technical manager Nicole Visser.

What is this amazing room?

- This is the dehusking room.

- What is dehusking?

- It's the operation with which we take out the husk of rice

from the grain.

It's not edible for human.

- The husk is the hard covering which protects the seed during growing.

It's removed by the dehusking machine.

5,000 kilos of rice an hour pass through two rubber rollers,

which shear off the rice husks.

A blast of air then separates the lighter husks

from the heavier grains of rice.

The smooth grains then pass through a salting machine,

where any rice grains still with their husks are separated out.

- So this is the rice without the husk.

- This doesn't look very like the rice I get in my rice pudding.

- No, because we haven't finished the process.

This is brown rice.

- Oh, so white rice

is just brown rice, but it's gone through one more process.

- Yeah, exactly.

- Like all short or long grain white rice,

our pudding rice starts off brown.

To turn it white, you have to remove the bran,

the edible coating around the grain,

which gives it that nutty flavour and natural brown colour.

Although it's high in fibre, vitamins ,and minerals,

it also acts as a barrier when cooking rice pudding.

- White rice absorbs the milk and sugar much better than brown rice.

Also, the starch is released during the cooking

and mixed with the milk to make a creamy pudding rice.

- How do you get bran off rice?

- We need four different polishing machines

to remove the bran from the rice.

- Inside each polishing machine,

two stone cylinders spin at 980 revolutions per minute.

As the rice passes between them, the bran is gently ground away,

finally leaving the white, starchy interior of the grain,

what we commonly know as white rice.

The pudding rice is then packed up into one-tonne bags,

ready for the 1,050 mile journey by road, rail, and sea to the UK.

So here it is, polished, primped, and preened,

ready for its big day at the rice pudding factory.

- Back at the factory, production is under way.

My delivery of 26 tonnes of rice has been unloaded.

Now I need some milk,

so I've made my way to the tank room to find lead operator Mark Knight...

Can we open that up?

- Let's do it.

- ..or Mark the Milk, as he's known about these parts.

Wonderful!

So what milk is in there?

- So that's skimmed milk and whole milk mixed together.

- Why do you mix them together?

- So there's the right levels of creaminess without being too fatty

and unhealthy.

- Right. OK. Well, how do you blend them?

- So the whole milk fat percentage fluctuates throughout the year.

Anything between 3.6 to 5%.

- The amount of fat in a cow's milk will go up and down?

I suppose it will, depending on what it eats, right?

- Depending on what it eats, yeah.

So in order to guarantee a consistent product,

we run it through our automatic blending rig to mix the two together

to give us a 2.2% fat percentage.

- Oh, I see.

Skimmed milk, you always know what the fat content is

because it's milk that's been processed.

- It comes in pretty much to 0.1% all the time.

- So, you have to blend the two to make sure that you always get 2.2?

- That's correct, yeah.

- So how much of this blended milk are we going to use in a batch

of rice pudding?

- This tank will hold 24,000 litres,

which is going to make about 60,000 tonnes of rice pudding.

And we'll make about six of these tanks every day.

- No way. No way.

Is our milk now ready to go into a rice pudding mix?

- Not quite. We still need to add some sugar and whey powder.

- Come on, show me where to go.

As the tank fills up with the 24,000 litres of milk I need for my batch

of 60,000 cans of rice pudding,

we head downstairs to the mixing area for my other ingredients.

- So this is where we add the sugar and the whey.

- Righto.

That's granular sugar like we put in our tea.

I thought it might be powdered, like icing sugar.

- No, no, it's granular sugar.

It's slightly finer than you would find in a supermarket.

- Well, I know what you use the sugar for, right?

It's to make it sweet.

But whey?

What exactly is whey?

- So whey is a by-product of cheese making.

You get it once you curdle the milk and strain it.

- So the curds and whey.

The whey that comes off the cheese make?

- That's right.

We add it to the milk because it's high in protein.

It's got amino acids, vitamins, calcium.

It's a way of making sure the texture is good

without increasing the fat content.

- This will thicken it up. - That's correct.

- It's a bit like the texture of custard powder.

It just thickens up on your tongue straight away.

You know what that tastes like?

Powdered milk, but it's a little bit salty.

- Yeah.

- Come on, then. I'll help.

Show me how to do it.

265 kilos of whey is emptied into the hopper below.

Whey! Whey! Whey!

From the hopper, the whey is sucked into the mixing tank above,

along with the sugar.

- It gets vacuumed across from our silo on site

into the hopper on top and measured into the batch.

- All right. Shall I shut this up?

- Let's do it.

- For two hours, my 24,000 litre milky mixture is agitated

by two spinning blades, dissolving the sugar,

and evenly distributing the whey.

It's then pumped to the milk processing area,

where the raw milk mix is pasteurised,

by heating it to 85 degrees Celsius for 15 seconds.

Now what happens to it?

- So now it gets homogenised.

- And what is that?

- Basically the process of passing the milk through a very small hole

at a very high pressure to break down the fat globules

within the milk to evenly disperse them.

- We are pretty much guaranteeing a thick, creamy liquid for the rice?

- That's right, yeah.

- It's then pumped into the balance tank.

So this is the finished milk mix that's going to go into my rice,

that's going to end up in the can? - Yes, it is.

- Can I have a taste? - Yeah.

- Can I? - Do it!

- Oh! Mate, that's good.

That is properly sweet, thick, and creamy. That is lovely.

Is that hot because it's just come from the pasteurisation?

- Yeah, that's right.

It sits in this balance sack at about 40 to 45 degrees.

- Is it now ready to meet the rice?

- Not quite. First you'll need a can.

You'll need to go and see Kevin.

- Kevin the Can?

Brilliant. Thank you, Mark the Milk.

Many of us first tried rice pudding at school,

when it was the highlight of some very dodgy dinners.

But in the 1940s, food wasn't the only thing being served up

in the canteen. Ruth's been investigating.

RUTH: Treacle sponge.

Jam roly-poly.

And, of course, rice pudding.

Most of us have pretty vivid memories of school dinners.

Some good, quite a lot...bad.

I remember an awful lot of lumpy mash and over-boiled carrots.

But what were school dinners like for an even earlier generation?

I'm peeling back the history to the origins of this quintessential

school time experience, with the help...

..of Gary McCulloch...

Hello, Gary, come on in. - Thank you very much.

- ..a specialist in the history of British schools.

So when do school dinners actually begin?

- Well, school meal provision officially started in 1906,

but that was not mandatory at that time.

Local authorities COULD do it, but many chose not to.

- It wasn't until towards the end of World War II

that free school meals for some children were made mandatory.

- The Second World War really started off a new set of thinking

about society, and as part of the new education

that children should have the right to have school meals.

- The 1944 Education Act promised not just free secondary education

for all pupils, but also free school meals,

with the National School Meals policy.

Oh, you've finish the carrots, thank goodness. - I have.

- Much like today, meals were free for those in need,

whilst other families paid a subsidised fee.

And how much did these school dinners cost?

- Well, it would be less than a shilling in old money

for a school meal.

- That's sort of roughly the price of a loaf of bread.

So that's cheap.

- It's pretty cheap, isn't it? Yes.

- To find out what the children of today make of a traditional

school meal, we've invited six kids and their teacher

for a 1940s school dinner.

Who's ready for lunch, then?

- No. - Yes!

- LAUGHTER

Come on!

So not much enthusiasm yet.

But it wasn't just food served up in the new government guidelines.

Well, look at this!

The 1944 Education Act also compelled teachers

to supervise lunchtime etiquette.

So this would be part of your duties,

to help us all learn good table manners?

- Apparently so. - Yes, absolutely.

It's very important. Schooling was supposed to prepare pupils

for not only the surroundings, but also how to eat.

- Eating with your mouth closed, no elbows on the table?

- No licking your lips, all of that sort of thing.

- So school dinners were not just about food?

- Absolutely not. It's a learning process.

It's part of the curriculum.

- The cutlery is set and the elbows are off the table.

And in some 1940s schools,

it was the girls' job to dish out dinner.

So then, ladies, are you ready for this?

1944. Come on, girls.

Looks yummy, yeah?

- Oh!

- Even during rationing, the Department of Health required

school meals to provide a third of the daily nutritional requirements.

ARCHIVE: - It is our duty to see that the new generation

is well nourished. They must be properly fed

with the right balance of vitamins and calories.

- Thank you very much.

- And the dietary regulations continued into the 1950s...

- Thank you.

- ..with a government directive stating school meals

had to include 650 to 1,000 calories...

- It's quite thick.

- ..with 20g of animal protein and 25 to 30g of fat...

- Oh, my gosh!

- ..with dishes like this old staple.

Welcome to the joys of Spam.

Is your appetite stimulated? Are you looking forward to this?

- No. - It's put me off my appetite.

- Throughout the 1950s, around half of all schoolchildren in the UK

were eating nutritionally designed mid-day meals.

A generous portion of meat and veg, which, perhaps surprisingly,

isn't too different from today's guidelines.

- That's so salty. - The texture's making me feel ill.

- While spam may be an acquired taste nowadays...

- I like it. - You like it? - Yeah.

- ..in the '50s, tinned meat was a staple

as Britain eased out of rationing.

- It's not even that bad.

- But over the next three decades, successive governments started

to lose their appetite for school dinners.

- Increasingly, school meals were seen to be a kind of a luxury item,

and so it lapsed again into being a matter of choice,

a matter of local provision, rather than a duty of the state.

- The 1980 Education Act abolished nutritional standards,

and over the next decade, a trend towards less healthy processed food

resulted in the children of the '90s being assessed

as poorly nourished compared to those of the 1950s.

Right, we're on pudding duty.

- Let's go.

- While many today still campaign for better quality school meal provision,

the 2000 Education Regulation reintroduced compulsory

nutritional standards for school lunches.

Pudding!

So, much like in the '40s and '50s, nutritious school meals

and the odd old-fashioned pud are back on the menu,

and free for 1.6 million children.

We might well have moaned about our school dinners at the time,

but giving kids a chance to get through a school day

without the distraction of an empty stomach

helped improve millions of lives.

Back on the factory floor,

I'm three hours and 40 minutes into production.

My rice has been delivered, my milk has been mixed,

and now I need something to put them in.

So I've rocked up to canning, where production team leader

Kevin Haj, or Kevin the Can, as he's also known,

is responsible for some serious heavy metal.

Kevin?

- Hello, Gregg. - Are you Kev the Can?

- Kev the Can. Welcome to the canning room.

- It's an extraordinary sight, do you know that?

Do you know what it reminds me of? High rise tower blocks.

- I can see why. - How many have you got in here?

- So in this room, we've got a total of 360,000 cans.

We'll use this whole room every single day.

- So every single day, you replace it?

- Every single day.

- Can I grab one?

- Feel free, Gregg.

No, no, not that one.

- It's like a massive game of Jenga. - Yeah, it is.

- These towering stacks are five metres high,

and each contain 12,288 cans.

Every can is 10.5 centimetres tall,

and made of 0.16 mm thick steel.

Not only durable, they're also fully recyclable.

HE CHUCKLES

The cans all have 19 corrugated ribs,

which form rings around them, increasing strength

and allowing them to expand and contract

with changes in temperature.

So are you solely responsible for feeding the cans into the factory?

- I am, along with the machine here, the automatic depalletiser.

I probably need to crack on and get this done, Gregg.

- I suppose if anyone can, Kev the Can can.

- Certainly can.

- As a pallet slides onto the machine, a robotic arm grips each layer

of 256 cans and moves them onto a conveyor.

For 16 metres, they are funnelled down,

until they run single file to the start of the filling line.

I love this. You know what this is for me?

It's like a metallic snake coiling its way through. - It is.

So the next step in the process, Gregg, we have the empty cans,

and we're going to put some rice in there.

- But I haven't seen it cooked yet.

- That's because it's not, Gregg.

We put raw rice in the can first.

- Dry, hard rice going into the cans?

- That's correct, Gregg.

We don't want to get the rice wet before we put it into the can,

because as soon as you introduce moisture to rice,

you can start getting more bacteria into it.

And also, if you have wet rice before you cook it,

it can be very clumpy, and then you get a lumpy product at the end.

- You cook the rice in the can?

- You cook the rice in the can, along with the milk.

- I would never have guessed that.

- No? - Would never, ever have guessed that in 100 years.

My rice has been transported from the store room

to the factory floor, where it's sieved then vacuum pumped

at 22kg per second into a two-tonne hopper above the depositor.

It then cascades into the 30 spinning depositor heads,

and as the cans pass under, each one is filled with rice.

How many cans are we filling up every minute?

- 500 cans per minute.

- No way. - So each can has 35g of rice in.

And as you can see here, it's that much rice.

- Well, that puffs up a lot, right? - It does, it certainly does, yeah.

- I love this! So those tonne bags of rice,

how long does one of those last in production?

- Approximately two hours.

- And how many bags are you going through a day?

- We use around 12 of them every single day.

- 12 tonnes of raw rice into cans

that you're filling up at a rate of 500 a minute?

- That's right. - I love this! What a revelation!

My cans are carried along a conveyor to the milk dispenser,

where my milk mix is pumped from the mixing tank

into a bowl inside the machine.

So how are you filling the cans?

- These pistons suck the milk up, and then as they push it back out,

that sprays out on the side of the can.

- Not straight into the bottom?

- If it went straight into the bottom,

there's a chance of the milk splashing out.

- As the cylinder revolves, pumps on the outside lift and drop,

sucking my milk mix into 36 pistons.

As the cans fly underneath, each nozzle sprays 365g of milk

at a 40 degree angle into every can.

- There you go, you can see it.

- Brilliant. - So we have 35g of rice, 365g of milk.

So that makes 400g total.

- Is that milk going in there hot?

- Yes, so that milk will be going in there about 45 degrees.

- So that rice is starting to cook straight away?

- Yeah, that's it. As soon as the milk mix hits the rice,

the rice starts to hydrate, and that starts the cooking process.

- Brilliant! Now what?

- There's one thing missing, Gregg. We need a lid on the top.

- The lids for my 60,000 cans need to be loaded by hand

into the next machine.

- So, Gregg, this is the seamer.

This is where the lids get put on the cans.

- Seamer? - The seamer.

- See more lids. Can I have a go?

- You can have a go. - Right, come out of the way.

- Come on. You have a go, Gregg. - Right.

- So on this pallet, we've got 86,000 lids.

Each one of these blue rolls has 300 lids in.

So these lids are going on here.

Nearly two of these sleeves every minute.

So you can see why we've got to work fast.

- Urgh!

Urgh!

Hey, I did it!

- You've done a good job.

- Do you want to see me do my "I'm fantastic at lids" dance?

- Go for it, Gregg.

It might not be so fantastic, Gregg, if you look behind you.

- Oh!

HE CHUCKLES

A two-kilo ball keeps the lids in place as they enter the seamer.

A roller then places a lid on top of each can.

A second roller then crimps the seams together,

sealing in my rice pudding mixture.

I've got a good eye for this.

Eye-lid, they're going to call me.

As 30,000 cans rattle through the seamer machine every hour...

Come on. - Let's go.

- ..it's time to let a professional take over.

I don't know about you, but I always seem to want a pudding

at the end of the meal.

Now, is it my belly making that decision, or is it my brain?

Cherry has been to find out.

It's one of life's great mysteries.

You think you can't eat another morsel,

and it takes just two words to magically create space.

- Dessert menu? - Go on, then.

I want to know why I can go from feeling stuffed

to suddenly finding room for pud.

So I've invited along Professor Marion Hetherington...

Hello, Marion.

..an expert in the science of appetite.

You are just in time for ice cream.

- Perfect.

- She's going to tell me whether our brains or our bellies are in charge.

First, I want to understand, what is that feeling of full?

- As soon as we start eating,

we're beginning to send signals to the brain about satiation.

- So getting full is satiation?

- That's right, and those signals are sent to the brain,

to the hypothalamus, which integrates those messages

from the stomach to say, "You've had enough to eat."

- The hypothalamus is the part of your brain that acts

as your body's control centre, telling you when you're full

and when you need to eat.

Thank you.

So why have I suddenly got more room to polish off this entire sundae?

- This is about hedonic hunger.

- Hedonic hunger.

Is that like hedonism?

- It's exactly like hedonism, because it's about the pleasure

of eating, and it's not about biological need.

So hedonic hunger is about anticipating the taste,

the smell, the feel of food in the mouth.

So even when you're full, your senses can be excited,

and hedonic hunger can override the hypothalamus.

- There are different types of hunger.

Homeostatic hunger is your body's response when it needs food

for fuel...

..whereas hedonic hunger is the enjoyment of eating,

whether it's a creamy dessert or your favourite packet of crisps.

So to put it to the test, we've invited some hungry cyclists

who've built up a healthy appetite.

Wow, it's like a Spandex fashion show.

Before we test their hedonic hunger mechanism, we need to satisfy

their homeostatic hunger, and make sure they're comfortably full...

Dig in, guys...and girls.

..by treating them to a carbohydrate-rich pizza feast.

I think I can see those waistbands expanding.

Does everyone feel full?

Comfortably full?

- I could eat a few more slices.

- Could you really?

- Yeah. - You could? Go, go, go!

I'm so sorry, false alarm.

God! Pass the man a pizza!

It takes around 20 minutes

for the stomach to tell the brain it's full,

and once everyone's homeostatic, hunger is finally satisfied,

it's time to move on to the main part of our experiment.

If you'd like to take your seats downstairs,

we shall bring you your second course.

To test their hedonic hunger,

we're separating our now full cyclists into two groups.

First up, Group A.

I'm not sure they're going to be thrilled about this.

- I don't think they are.

- How will they react to more pizza?

LAUGHTER

Hedonic hunger doesn't seem to be kicking in for Group A,

as some struggle to eat a single extra slice...

..and others, nothing at all.

But would another savoury snack have done the trick?

What if we had served this group something different from pizza,

like olives - would they have eaten it?

- They might eat a little bit more

because it's different from the pizza.

So variety in itself will stimulate intake,

but it won't stimulate intake as much as something

that's entirely different from a sensory perspective.

- So how will Group B respond...

Here we go. I think this reveal is going to go a bit better.

..to pancake sundaes?

Much happier!

Look at those happy faces.

Not a single person has said no to the pudding.

Why is that?

- So this is hedonic hunger.

They're eating in the absence of hunger, because they're being

offered something that is really exciting their sensory awareness

and sensory anticipation.

- The excitement of a treat, whether it's ice cream sundae

or cheese and biscuits, causes the midbrain to release dopamine,

a hormone associated with pleasure.

This triggers the brain to expect a reward,

and so it overrides the hypothalamus,

making us think there's room not only for pud,

but for any food we find rewarding.

So even though the hypothalamus has sent messages to the body saying,

"You're full," they've managed to override it?

- That's right,

and that was stimulated by offering them the dessert.

- Despite being full, their hedonic hunger mechanism made them

polish off an average of 283 grams of dessert each,

on top of a belly full of pizza.

So I think science has proven that there is always room for pud.

- Yes, because when you've had something to eat,

and then someone offers you dessert,

you're going to be stimulated to eat again.

This will stimulate overeating, so we've got to be very careful

around having lots of different sweet treats.

- So just remember, if you can't resist ordering the occasional

dessert or treat of choice, don't be too hard on yourself.

You can always blame your brain.

Back at the factory,

I'm with production team leader Kevin the Can.

My batch of 60,000 cans have been filled with rice and milk mix

and sealed.

They're then weighed to make sure each can contains 400g...

Whoa! - It's quick. - Whoa, whoa, whoa!

..and ink coded with a best before date.

From there, a conveyor transports them through to the cooking area.

Whoa! Whoa, this is hot.

Man, this is seriously... It's like being in an airing cupboard.

Is that because we're on top of the oven?

- Yeah, certainly is, Gregg.

- Why do you cook them in the can?

- First reason is to keep all the moisture in the can

so that the rice pudding doesn't dry out.

But then another reason is that kills any bacteria

in the can and doesn't let any more enter.

- Right, OK, well, take me through the cooking process, please.

- So there's four ovens, Gregg.

- Hang on, hang on - four separate ovens?

- Four. They each do their own job.

First one is a pre oven, so it starts off down this end,

and by the time it gets up the other end,

it'll get up to about 80 degrees.

- The pre oven is half filled with water,

which is heated to 80 degrees Celsius.

As my cans enter the chamber, they're held on tracks

that corkscrew down a 14-metre long tunnel...

..rotating all the time and dipping in and out of the water.

This gradually warms the rice puddings, ensuring the milk

doesn't split and clump when it's transferred

into the next oven.

- This cooker, then, is 118 degrees.

- That's boiling it? - That's boiling it.

- How are you cooking these cans of rice pudding?

- Steam, Gregg. These cookers are both using steam

to surround the cans and cook the product inside.

- Using steam allows for a higher temperature,

which sterilises the rice pudding inside the cans.

As they travel through the next two ovens at 118 degrees Celsius,

the rice swells and softens as it absorbs the milk.

Starch is released and, along with the whey, thickens the liquid,

making the creamy texture,

whilst the sugar caramelises, adding flavour and colour.

And how long does that take?

- That takes 12.5 minutes in each cooker.

- Wow! Right, OK.

- So the reason the cans are revolving as they go down through

is to keep the product agitated

so we get a proper cook all the way through the product.

- So what's the fourth cooker?

- The fourth cooker is actually the cooler, Gregg.

- To cool my cans, they're dipped into cold water,

which takes them from 118 degrees to around 40 degrees Celsius

in 12.5 minutes.

The can gets hot, then really hot, then cool quite quickly,

and that's how the rings on the can help it,

to expand and shrink with the heat and the cold, right?

- Yeah, that's exactly it, Gregg, yeah.

- So how many cans are being cooked at any one time?

- We can have 22,000 cans in here.

- HE LAUGHS

I love the scale of this, I do.

Right as interesting as this is,

I'm beginning to feel like a tin of rice pudding. I am melting.

- Let's get down from here, Gregg.

- It'll take three hours for my batch of 60,000 rice puddings

to pass through the cookers, so I've got time to cool off.

Most items of food we buy these days come with a use by date.

But who came up with that idea in the first place?

Ruth has been finding out.

Cleaning out the cupboards.

Not an easy task for those of us who like to hang on to...

..historic food.

Nah, should be all right.

Of course, the little dates we find on all modern food packaging

make it that much easier.

So how did sell by dates become such an essential part of food packaging?

To find out, I'm stepping back in time to grab some groceries.

- Morning, Ruth. - What's good today, then, Mukta?

- We've just had some fresh sausages delivered.

- It's the 1930s, and the shopkeeper is historian Mukta Das.

Half a dozen, please. - Half a dozen coming right up.

- So, back in the 1930s, how would people have known

whether the food was fresh before there were sell by dates?

- You would have come in, you would have asked me what was fresh.

I would have known the local farmers,

I'd have known how they produced their meat, and so you would

trust me to be able to give you food that was of good quality

and a freshness that you'd expect.

- I'm not doing a week's shopping. I'm coming in for fresh food every day.

- Yes, absolutely. And that would have made sell by dates

kind of unnecessary in that system.

There you go. Your sausages are ready. - Oh, thank you.

But that all changed when the UK's first supermarket opened in 1948,

beginning a revolution in how we shop.

Oh, such a lot of shopping!

Rather than buying small amounts of fresh food locally every day,

shoppers got much more hands-on.

"Help yourself," a lady with a shopping basket.

- Looking very happy!

- Shopping carts were loaded up with fresh foods, which had

arrived on different days, and from suppliers all over the country.

And a kitchen appliance which was becoming more affordable

helped shoppers to store it.

- The domestic refrigerator. - Yes. Can I pop the cheese in there?

- And I will put the chicken in here.

- By the end of the 1950s, around 13% of households had a refrigerator,

but keeping food for longer brought new risks.

- You don't really get a sense of a shelf life with a fridge,

and so it starts to produce a sense of anxiety among consumers.

- I mean, were there problems? - Yes. Many, many problems.

- The Ministry of Food estimated around 100,000 cases of food poisoning

between 1946 and 1965.

- The more complicated our food chain becomes,

the more there's a sense of anxiety about what you're eating,

and then there should be more will to act.

Bu the action doesn't come from government,

it comes from supermarkets.

- One of the first to act to calm shoppers' concerns

was Marks & Spencer.

In 1970, in a UK first, they put sell by dates on perishable foods.

And so this is explaining it to their customers. - Mm.

- "So that you can see for yourself how fresh our products are,

"we are now showing sell by dates on fresh foods."

And did this sell by date thing work? - It certainly did.

People were flocking to M&S as a result of this innovation

and so other supermarkets had to act also.

- Although not compulsory, by the mid '70s, most supermarkets had followed

suit, with food manufacturers themselves determining

the length of their sell by dates.

So an anxious public, reassured by a simple date on the packaging,

learned to relax about buying their weekly meat and dairy.

But having solved one issue, sell by dates created another.

This is well past its sell by date, so should I ditch it?

- This is part of the problem, right?

Over the decades, you're seeing a lot more food waste happen

because people are chucking this food out,

which is actually, possibly, perfectly serviceable.

- In search of clarity,

the food labelling regulations of 1996 introduced "best before"

as a guide for food quality

and "use by" as a warning about food safety,

while "sell by" dates were phased out.

But once again, some dilemmas remain.

- I think we're still struggling to get it right,

so, you know, use by dates and best before...

Use by - definitely don't eat food after that date.

Best before - it's a guide. Look at it, shake it, smell it.

What we need is to bring back those skills, to be able to judge

whether the food is safe or not.

- So, for getting the right balance between safety on the one hand

and squandering perfectly good food on the other,

it appears there's still no easy answer.

It does make you wonder

if there's really any rush to clean out the cupboards.

Back at the factory, I'm four hours and 30 minutes into production.

My cans of rice pudding have been weighed, cooked,

and hot off the production line,

they've made their way to the packing area.

But there's just one thing to do before they carry on their journey.

Do you know? I've never, ever tasted this warm.

I've only ever had it cold out the fridge.

- So what do you think?

- That rice is as soft as you can get without disintegrating.

The milk is now sweet. That's really good!

And this creaminess here is the starch that's come

out of the rice, right? - Yeah, that's right.

Give it a couple more days, when that's cooled down,

that will get even thicker. - Really? Yeah.

There is a lot of science going on in this little tin.

My word!

Taste test complete, my warm rice puddings are transported

to the labelling machine.

- So these cans are coming through here at 30,000 cans an hour. - Ah!

Of course they are! None of these numbers are shocking me any more.

What's happening here? - Right, so, this machine here, Gregg,

is putting the labels onto the can. - Right. - I'll show you how to do it.

Cardboard off, and then you need to fan them.

If you don't fan them, they'll get stuck together,

and you'll have two labels on a can.

- Are you a big fan? - Ha! I'm a big fan, Gregg.

- Come on, swap over, let me get in there. - You want to have a go?

- You've got to be a big fan... - Be a big fan.

- Slippery little fellas, they are. Right. Whoa! They're vibrating!

- So, that keeps the labels from sticking together as well.

- As the labels are fed into the machine,

two strips of glue secure them in place as the cans rotate.

A little bit of me has gone into this production, you know?

My labelled cans travel from the labelling machine

along a conveyor and into the packing machine.

- This machine splits them up into three rows of four,

so 12 cans per tray.

Then it stacks two trays on top of each tother

to make a case of 24 cans.

- My stacked cans are wrapped in recyclable film by an automated arm,

then sent through a heat tunnel for 12.5 seconds at 100 degrees Celsius,

which shrink-wraps the film around the case.

Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!

Fist bump. Boom!

It takes two hours to stack

and wrap every one of my batch of rice puddings.

Rice pudding is tasty all on its own.

But if you are going to add something extra,

you can't go wrong with a bit of jam.

And Cherry is on the hunt for her favourite flavour.

CHERRY: Raspberry, apricot,

and, of course, cherry -

there are so many lip-smacking choices of jam!

But, like many a rice pudding traditionalist,

I really think there's only one option.

Strawberry. Mm!

But what's the secret behind a perfect pot?

To find out, I've come to a company in the village of Tiptree in Essex,

which makes more than a million jars of strawberry jam every year.

Stop!

Andrey Ivanov is farm manager...

Can I have a lift? - Hop in! - Perfect!

..of jam-maker Wilkin & Sons.

There are strawberries as far as the eye can see.

How many strawberries do you grow a year?

- I would say over 100 million berries. - Oh, my God!

That is a lot of berries! - Yeah.

- All the strawberries for a year's worth of jam production

are grown over a six-month period from May to October.

Wow! Look at these big red juicy strawberries, absolutely everywhere!

It takes up to 90 days from planting to picking.

As the strawberry ripens, sugar levels increase from 5%

to around 8%, making the berries taste sweeter.

Meanwhile, a hormone called Auxin causes the cells of the strawberry

to start to break down, making it softer and juicier.

And a pigment called Anthocyanin turns the strawberry a deep red,

indicating it's ready to eat.

Cor!

So you've got 100 million berries to pick -

could you do with an extra pair of hands?

- Absolutely.

Let's pick up the pace.

- In peak picking season, a team of up to 300

can harvest more than 1,000 strawberries each per day.

That's a good one.

Are these the same strawberries that I might buy from a supermarket?

- They are the same, but for jam, we leave them for a bit longer

on the plant, so they get a little bit juicier.

They develop the colour better and a bit softer.

- So that's my cue to make some jam.

Just a mile down the road is the jam factory,

where I'm meeting manager Mark Smith.

Mark, I brought you a present.

- Strawberries! - Strawberries!

- Thank you.

- Every day, five tonnes of strawberries are washed,

de-stemmed by hand, and frozen to keep them fresh.

They're then stored in a vast freezer

that holds up to 800 tonnes of fruit ready for year-round production.

What's this room?

- So this is our main boiling platform.

There's 14 boiling pans up here.

- Can I help? - Of course you can, yes. - OK, what do we do first?

- First of all, we're going to put the sugar syrup in.

So that's the green button.

- For my batch of 200 jars, we add 47 litres of sugar syrup,

a sugar and water mix.

Why do you add sugar

when strawberries naturally have sugar in them?

- Strawberries have a small amount of sugar in, but not enough.

They wouldn't taste very nice if we just used strawberries.

- To legally be called a jam,

the recipe must contain a minimum of 60% sugars.

- A high sugar content in anything will help preserve that product,

but it also gives us the flavour we're looking for.

- Next, 15 litres of water are added to the sugar syrup.

Then with the press of a button...

..our star ingredient makes its entrance...

..in a flying hopper.

Oh, look!

- Don't get in the way of it. - No, OK.

Oh, that's brilliant.

So how many strawberries have we just ordered?

- There's 34 kilos of strawberries in there,

with two kilos of pectin.

- What's pectin?

- Pectin is a natural occurring substance.

We get pectin in all kinds of fruits. It helps to set.

It binds everything together.

Strawberries have pectin in, but we need to add to that.

- Along with the pectin and strawberries,

we're adding a scoop of citric acid, which draws the pectin from the fruit

and helps the jam set more quickly.

Just one thing left to do.

Can we get jamming?

- Yes, of course.

- How do we get this cauldron cooking?

- Press the red button.

- That one? - That one.

- Inside the pan, this jam mix is boiled until it reaches

105 degrees Celsius.

- So as it heats up, the molecules in the pectin expand, and they kind

of grab the rest of the molecules and bind them all together,

and that's what gives us the consistency we need.

- Ten minutes of boiling reduces the water content

and concentrates the sugar and fruit.

It smells delicious.

- It's ready to go. - It's ready to go?

The strawberry jam drops into a hopper below.

340g is then pumped into each jar at 100 degrees Celsius,

before being sealed.

As the jars are cooled, the sugar holds on to the water molecules

in the mixture, along with the pectin,

forming a thick jammy structure.

And finally, the jars are labelled and packed.

The factory can produce enough jam

to fill around 400,000 mini and full sized jars a day.

LID POPS OFF

That is one of my favourite noises in the entire world,

because it guarantees that happiness is just a spoonful away.

Mm! All I need now is some rice pudding.

Back at the factory, my 60,000 cans of rice pudding have been stacked...

..wrapped...

..and have finally made it to dispatch...

Hey, Rachel, I'll come round.

..where factory general manager Rachel Matheson

is ready and waiting.

Great to see you again. Are we waving goodbye

to my batch of rice pudding now? Is it on its way?

- This is your batch of rice pudding, Gregg, almost fully loaded

and ready to go. - And very smart it looks too.

Can I ask you about numbers?

So how many pallets on a truck?

- 26 pallets on this truck, or there will be.

- And here's the question - how many tins of rice pudding on a truck?

- 52,000.

- Right, and how often does a truck leave this factory?

- We'll have seven or eight trucks leaving a day.

So in the course of a day,

we can make up to 360,000 cans of rice pudding.

- So how many cans of rice pudding are you sending out of here in a week?

- We can send up to 2,340,000 cans of rice pudding out in a week.

- Every week? - Every week.

- Over two million cans of rice pudding every week?

- Yes. - That's amazing!

I've enjoyed this factory.

I met Mark the Milk, Kevin the Can,

it's lovely to finish off with Rachael the Rice.

- I'll take that.

- Just six hours and 45 minutes after the start of production,

my rice puddings leave the factory.

From here, they head to a central distribution centre,

where they're delivered throughout the UK and Ireland,

and as far as France, North America, and Australia.

Before I came here, I used to think that making rice pudding

was all about stirring a pan on a stove,

but there's clearly much more to it than that.

From milk and whey...

Whey! Whey! Whey!

..to rapid rice...

12 tonnes of raw rice into cans

that you're filling up at a rate of 500 a minute?

- That's right. - I love this! What a revelation!

..and cooking cans.

- We put the rice in the can along with the milk.

- I would never have guessed that. - No?

- Would never, ever have guessed that in 100 years.

To create a creamy, sticky, delicious rice pudding,

all the elements have to be just right.

Mm!

Got any jam?