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In Wigan, Gregg Wallace visits an enormous soup factory, which produces two million tins a day.

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.

Meanwhile, 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.

Historian 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.

58 minutes

Music Played

  • Sigala

    Brighter Days

  • Kodaline

    The Riddle

  • Ed Sheeran

    I'm A Mess

  • Model Man

    Autumn Thieves

  • Hot Butter

    Popcorn

  • Years & Years

    Up In Flames

  • George Ezra

    Pretty Shining People

  • Zak Abel

    Love Song

  • Bang Bang Romeo

    Shame On You

  • Clean Bandit

    Symphony (feat. Zara Larsson)

  • Kodaline

    Follow Your Fire

  • Dua Lipa

    Dreams

Credits

Role Contributor
Presenter Gregg Wallace
Presenter Cherry Healey
Presenter Ruth Goodman
Executive Producer Amanda Lyon
Executive Producer Sanjay Singhal
Producer Sam Bailey
Director Sam Bailey
Series Producer Michael Rees
Production Manager Samara Friend
Production Company Voltage TV
Music Steve Tait

Broadcasts

Learn more about the history of the factory and how it has evolved with an interactive from The Open University.

The fascinating stories behind the production of some of our favourite products.