Breakfast Cereal

Paddy McGuinness explores the Kellogg’s factory in Wrexham to reveal how it makes 120 million boxes of breakfast cereal a year, inside a huge factory covering an area bigger than seven football pitches. In this episode, he’s learning the secrets of how they make Special K.

It all starts with a Paddy-style glimpse of the strict hygiene rules that apply when entering a food factory. Automated taps wash and dry his hands. Then he stomps through a chemical bath, which reminds him of the public swimming baths. As he enters the factory, he’s spotlessly clean!

The first job is unloading a lorry full of rice, one of the grains in the cereal and which makes up 47 per cent of a finished flake. Before they can unload the rice, Paddy and his guide, Craig Williams, clip on harnesses and climb on top of the lorry to get a sample. After the sample passes a test, the rice is unloaded into one of four 30-metre-tall silos.

Paddy heads inside the factory and meets factory food designer Lizzie Waiting. She tells Paddy that the flakes of cereal will consist of four key ingredients – rice, wheat, kibbled barley and barley flour. All four ingredients are sent rushing along pipes into enormous cookers. Inside the cookers, more ingredients are added, and the whole lot is blasted with steam to cook the mix. Three hours after Paddy saw his rice delivered, a massive load of freshly cooked mix is dumped out of the mixer.

To find out how the warm, soft cereal mix is transformed into crisp flakes, Paddy hikes across the enormous factory to meet head of operations Ian Selley. Ian describes how the water is slowly removed from the mix using a series of machines before it passes through a pellet mill, which turns the mix into little pellets that will each become one flake of cereal. The scale of the operation is amazing. Ian tells Paddy that the ten pellet mills are capable of producing the equivalent of 4,000 bowls of cereal a minute!

It doesn’t take long for the pellets of cereal to make their way to the next set of machines – the flaking mills – where, all of a sudden, they are transformed into something far more recognisable... flakes! However, they still contain too much moisture. To solve that, Paddy and Ian follow their floppy flakes through a huge toaster operating in excess of 200 degrees Celsius, evaporating the water and toasting the flakes to brown them and bring out the aromas and flavours. Paddy picks up a sample from the production line to taste. He’s surprised because, although he’s getting a lovely crunch, he’s not getting the full flavour that he knows. Ian reassures him that the next machine coats each flake in a syrup containing sugar, salt, water and vitamins. Sure enough, with this vital stage complete, Paddy instantly recognises the flavour when he tastes them.

With the cereal made, 440 grams are weighed out, sealed into bags and dropped into boxes, before being sent to the dispatch area of the factory. There, project lead Donna Jenkins shows Paddy the factory’s pride and joy – 25 automated, guided vehicles which collect pallets of finished cereal and load them onto bays, ready to go into the back of the lorries. Paddy has fun testing the safety sensors on the automated vehicles, first by placing a cardboard box in front of one of them, and then by stepping right in front of one himself.

Finally, Paddy watches 19,000 boxes of finished cereal, as they are loaded onto the back of a waiting lorry, leave the factory to grace the bowls of breakfast lovers across the country.

Elsewhere in the episode, Cherry is at a wheat farm, and it’s a race against time as she helps to get the previous harvest in for Paddy’s factory before the rain arrives. And she tries to settle a heated debate in many families: what’s the best way to stack the dishwasher? Meanwhile, historian Ruth Goodman explores the history of the humble but ubiquitous stainless-steel spoon.