Inside the Factory

Gregg Wallace visits the biggest cider factory in the world, which produces more than 350 million litres each year. The scale of production blows his mind as at each turn he's confronted with huge machinery and incredible processes. He visits Birchley Farm in Herefordshire, at the heart of cider country, before heading to the mill at Ledbury to help sort the apples. At the factory itself, he learns about the fermentation process and the critical role of yeast, before being shown the vast scale of the bottling process, which sees 833 bottles cleaned and filled every minute.

Meanwhile, Cherry Healey explores how the factory is creating new orchards of a sweet apple variety called Scrumptious through the ancient technique of grafting, as well as revealing how a by-product from the brewing industry, CO2, is vital in the manufacture of fire extinguishers.

Historian Ruth Goodman traces a Victorian apple-breeding boom with Dr Annie Gray, recreating one of Queen Victoria's favourite baked apple desserts. And she learns how it was British scientists and cider makers - not French champagne makers - who were the first to put fizz in a bottle.

To keep their feet nice and warm, the British spend almost 723 million pounds a year on socks! In the second episode of this new series, Gregg Wallace visits a sock factory in Leicester that produces one and a half million socks annually. This atmospheric factory is a fascinating mix of Wallace and Gromit-style and high-tech machinery, with a close-knit team of highly skilled operators.

Elsewhere in the episode, Cherry Healey finds out what causes smelly feet and pounds the pavements to test out which socks best tackle this stinky situation. She visits a cotton spinning factory in Manchester, whose high-tech machinery produces 4,200 miles of yarn every hour, and meets a revolutionary eco cotton supplier.

Historian Ruth Goodman steps back into the 1980s, when socks were at the height of fashion. And she ventures further back to the Great War, when the ‘Kitchener stitch' helped to save the feet of British soldiers in the trenches.

We eat them for breakfast, pack them in our lunch boxes and enjoy them for dessert; here in the UK we spend £1.4 billion a year on yoghurt pots. Gregg Wallace visits a factory in rural Somerset that produces one million pots of it every 24 hours. He meets the herd of Friesian cows that provide the milk, sees how the milk is processed and has a bacterial culture added, and watches how the extraordinary packing process takes place.

Meanwhile, Cherry Healey helps out with the UK's biggest blackcurrant harvest, trying out plant based alternatives to milk and visiting a factory that makes food-safe yoghurt pots from 100% recycled material.

Also, historian Ruth Goodman hops on board the story of the electric milk float and tackles the contentious origins of the cream tea.

Gregg Wallace catches up with workers at the Typhoo Tea factory on the Wirral, which he visited back in 2017, where production has been upped to produce 109 million bags a week. In reports from the programme's archives, Cherry Healey visits a tea processing plant in Kenya, and Ruth Goodman sheds light on how Second World War troops risked their lives to brew up.

Gregg Wallace checks in with one of Britain's biggest biscuit factories, chatting to some of the workers via video calls to find out how they are coping during the Coronavirus pandemic. Gregg speaks to manager Nina Sparks, who he met during his visit back in 2017. Nina reassures him that all the ingredients for the biscuits are still getting through, including the flour that has been missing from many supermarket shelves due to a packaging shortage. Nina agrees to be Gregg's `roving reporter", to show him what's changed on the production lines to meet demand, and what new safety measures have been put in place to keep the staff safe.