Inside the Factory Catch up, Series 5: 8. Soup on BBC 2

Inside the Factory

Series 5: 8. Soup

In Wigan, Gregg Wallace visits an enormous soup factory, which produces two million tins a day. He follows the production of vegetable soup, from a pea harvest in Yorkshire right through to the finished soup going into cans and being dispatched. Along the way, Gregg watches as a five-tonne avalanche of peas – around a million individual peas – is frozen within two hours of being picked. He mixes up three tonnes of veg and 500 gallons of tomato sauce and watches as they are combined and packed into 10,000 tins. Gregg is astonished by a 27.4m-tall pressure-cooking tower and surprised to learn that for every one degree drop in temperature in winter, the factory observes a 3.5% increase in soup sales.\n \nMeanwhile, Cherry Healey is measuring the vitamin content of fresh and frozen vegetables. She finds that her sample of frozen peas have six times the vitamin C content of fresh, while sprouts do even better with 800% more. Cherry travels to a rock salt mine outside Crewe, which supplies half of all salt used in the UK food industry, and runs an experiment to see if soup could be the answer to staying fuller for longer.\n \nHistorian Ruth Goodman is cooking up a batch of ‘soop of buttered spinach’ from the 17th-century cookbook of Robert May. This is the first reference to a recipe for soup in English, but the resulting sweet, vegetable puree doesn’t resemble soup as we know it today. She also heads to Poplar in east London to a Salvation Army soup kitchen. Here, Ruth discovers that the notion of the soup kitchen originally began in 1795 as a response to a countrywide harvest failure.

Source: BBC 2

Most recent episodes of Inside the Factory

Inside The Factory

Series 8: 2. Jelly Beans

Gregg Wallace explores the Jelly Bean Factory in Dublin to reveal the incredible processes it employs to make ten million colourful little sweets every day.\n\nCherry Healey vis ...

05-09-2024

BBC 2

All episodes

Inside The Factory

Series 7: Trains

When he was a child, Gregg loved playing with toy trainsets. Now he’s got special access to learn how the ultimate model is made: a huge 187-tonne, five-carriage electric ...

29-08-2024

BBC 2

All episodes

Inside The Factory

Series 5: 7. Pots And Pans

Gregg Wallace is in France at an enormous foundry that produces a cast iron pot every five seconds. He follows production of casserole dishes from the arrival of 20 tonnes of cr ...

25-08-2024

BBC 2

All episodes

Inside The Factory

Series 7: Mints

Gregg Wallace visits a factory with a menthol scent - the Polos factory in York, which produces 32 million mints every day and contributes to the 19,000 tonnes of mints per year ...

15-08-2024

BBC 2

All episodes

Inside The Factory

Series 7: Rice Pudding

Gregg Wallace explores the Ambrosia factory in Lifton, Devon, to reveal how it makes up to 360,000 rice puddings every single day.\n\nCherry Healey is in the Po Valley in Italy ...

06-08-2024

BBC 2

All episodes

Inside The Factory

Series 7: Vegan Sausages

Gregg Wallace visits a Yorkshire team that churn out up to 90,000 vegan sausages a day! Heck have been making these bangers since 2018, and the process is surprisingly futuristi ...

30-07-2024

BBC 2

All episodes

Inside The Factory

Series 7: Crumpets

Gregg Wallace visits the factory making 432 million crumpets every year. Crumpets are a British classic made from a precise combination of ingredients, using some clever chemist ...

24-07-2024

BBC 2

All episodes

Inside The Factory

Series 5: 8. Soup

In Wigan, Gregg Wallace visits an enormous soup factory, which produces two million tins a day. He follows the production of vegetable soup, from a pea harvest in Yorkshire righ ...

14-07-2024

BBC 2

All episodes

Inside The Factory

Series 7: Pork Pies

Gregg Wallace explores the Vale of Mowbray pork pie factory in Northallerton, Yorkshire, which began making pork pies in 1928. He visited the factory in May 2022, following prod ...

10-07-2024

BBC 2

All episodes

Inside The Factory

Series 5: 2. Wax Jackets

Gregg Wallace is in South Shields at a clothing factory where they produce 650 waxed jackets a day. He follows the production of water-resistant jackets from the arrival of 500- ...

02-07-2024

BBC 2

All episodes