Inside the Factory - Season 2, Episode 01: Cereal

Over the course of six episodes they’ll take viewers on a guided tour of the production lines that operate 24 hours a day to make some of the UK’s favourite products on an industrial scale. Every morning in Britain we get through over one and half million bowls of cornflakes. In Cereal, Gregg will be on the factory floor at Kelloggs’s biggest factory near Manchester, which is the single largest producer of breakfast cereal in Europe. We’ll see Gregg receiving corn fresh off the boat from Argentina and following its journey as it is cooked, milled and flavoured to become Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. He'll discover how the factory can produce more than a million boxes of cereal every 24 hours and distribute them all over the UK, Europe and across the globe, as far away as Malaysia. Meanwhile Cherry Healey looks beyond the factory floor to find out why many vitamins are added to breakfast cereal and the resultant health benefits of doing so. She also discovers the effect that skipping breakfast has on our cognitive function and she follows the production of the nation’s best-selling cereal, Weetabix, learning how every single grain of wheat that is milled for these wheat biscuits is grown within a 50 mile radius of the factory. And historian Ruth Goodman looks at how breakfast cereal was invented as a healthy alternative to the average Victorian household’s mind-boggling breakfast feasts. Ruth will also discover the effect of nostalgia, with the six top selling cereals in the UK today all invented more than 30 years ago.