Summer's Supermarket Secrets Supermarket Secrets

'We've become a nation of supermarket shoppers.'

We buy a staggering 90% of our food from supermarkets.

Not everyone's a supermarket fan, but we do rely on them

to give us the food that we want when we want it.

Now, that is a huge challenge,

and I want to find out how the supermarkets do it.

Whoa-ho-ho-ho!

'I'm going behind-the-scenes with Britain's biggest food retailers.'

This may be the nuttiest thing I've ever seen!

'I've got exclusive access to discover how they source...'

Let's grill one.

'..how they make...'

No! Slow it down, please.

..and how they move our food on an epic scale!

HE LAUGHS

'It's a massive operation.

'It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

'I'll be tracking it season by season...

'..starting with summer and the things we buy

'when the weather looks up.

'I'll find out why there's more

'than meets the eye in a supermarket strawberry...'

-This tunnel here is about an hour's worth of sales.

-Wow!

'..what it takes to bring us our barbecues...'

Back of the net!

'..and I discover how the supermarkets

'know what we're going to buy before we do.'

We enter weather data in three times a day,

because weather really affects what people buy.

Supermarkets have a huge influence over our everyday lives.

But exactly how they bring us our food has been hidden, until now.

Britain's first supermarket

opened in Streatham, London, in 1951.

Since then, they've multiplied and become part of our landscape.

Over 18,000 stores now populate

every corner of the UK.

I've been in the food industry all of my working life,

from wholesale greengrocer, to running a restaurant.

But, I don't know the supermarket world, except as a customer.

And, in my time, I've seen them go from small grocers to

multi-million pound businesses

and I want to know what makes them tick.

# Da da da de da de da

# Du de da da da da... #

And summer is where I want to start.

British summertime can be an unpredictable beast, but when

the sun shines, we want barbecues and picnics and we want 'em now.

The supermarkets are under serious pressure

to deliver our summer favourites.

There is one product that is right at the centre of the supermarkets'

summer battleground and it's this little fellow,

the humble strawberry.

In the summer months, demand for strawberries rockets.

We buy 20 million of them a day.

And the supermarkets know we buy more if they're the right size,

they have no bruises and are sweet and juicy.

So, what is the secret to giving us

the strawberries that we're looking for?

'For a start, you need colossal fruit farms, like this one in Kent.

'It's six o'clock on a summer's morning

'and this place is already buzzing.'

I'm involved in strawberry growing

and I've been a greengrocer for many, many years,

so I'm used to early mornings.

And these polytunnels, well,

they're just a part of modern growing.

But how do you grow millions and millions of berries?

'I'm here to meet Sainsbury's technical manager for fruit and veg,

'Simon Hinks, a man with a lot on his plate.

'He looks after billions of pounds worth of produce.'

This is a serious amount of strawberries.

Hello, Simon. How are you doing?

-Hello, Gregg.

-You head up the technical team.

-I do, indeed.

-You know all about strawberries.

Customers love strawberries.

In the middle of summer, they're still our number one product.

So we're selling millions of punnets every week.

Number one product, what do you mean?

It's our biggest price at Sainsbury's.

-You're kidding me?

-Absolutely.

-What, in terms of money taken?

-Correct.

Oooh.

-So it is serious...

-It's big business.

This tunnel here is about an hour's worth of sales.

Wow, that's a really good way of looking at it.

-So, right now, I'm in about 30 seconds.

-Approximately.

-Every 30 seconds, this many strawberries go?

-Absolutely.

-That is crazy!

-Gregg, it's a huge scale.

'When strawberries are shifting off the shelves that fast,

'you need to keep 'em coming.'

Let's have a go.

-I'll take the left, you take the right, yeah?

-OK.

'And, to give them as long a British strawberry season as possible,

'the supermarkets need different varieties.'

We're currently using, through the British season, 14 different varieties.

Those that deliver loads of fruit in June, when we really want it,

and those that deliver fruit throughout the season.

'June is when our strawberry habit peaks, helped on by Wimbledon.

'So Simon is on a mission to find a better variety that

'delivers in this crucial month, one he hopes will give him

'the edge over his competitors.'

I've got a great strawberry I'd like to show you.

-You're a bit excited about this, aren't you?

-I am.

-Do you talk to your wife about strawberries?

-A lot.

-Does she think you're a little bit weird?

-Very.

Have you ever thought about phoning Strawberries Anonymous?

I think I probably should, actually.

'So, the next stop for me

'and Simon the strawberry addict is East Malling Research.

'Places like this are a secret weapon of the supermarkets.

'They develop new varieties of everything,

'from soft fruit to pears and potatoes.

'Strawberries get a lot of investment

'because they're such a big earner.

'Sainsbury's alone spend millions of pounds every year on them.'

-This place is full of...

-Professors, scientists, doctors,

real centre of knowledge.

'Simon's go-to man when he wants a new strawberry

'is Dr David Simpson.

'He's spent the last 30 years developing different varieties,

'and he's come up with Simon's great new hope.'

And here we have the big secret, the Malling Centenary.

It looks like the other strawberries.

I think it looks beautiful.

Yes, but we know that you may be slightly touched.

I am slightly biased.

-We've been working on this for eight years.

-Eight years?

Yeah, eight years.

It's a painstaking process to create new varieties.

'They breed their best-performing strawberries

'with each other by transferring pollen from the flower of one

'variety to the flower of another.

'When the new berry grows, they take its seeds and grow new plants

'from them, and then they do the same thing again,

'and again,

'and again.

'It's taken eight years and 13,000 plants to get a strawberry

'with the qualities they want.

'It's a process David's very familiar with.'

My first job was to extend the strawberry season and,

at that time, it was six weeks

and I was told to extend it to eight weeks.

It's now about seven months.

-May, June, July, August, September, Octo...

-Yeah.

You're not getting strawberries into November?

End of October, definitely.

'Crikey!

'Personally, I prefer eating fresh produce

'in the season that nature intended,

'but we've been stretching seasons since farming began.'

I mean, I eat a phenomenal number of strawberries during the summer.

Probably two kilos a day, Monday to Friday, something like that.

Mate, you...

It's a lot of strawberries to eat.

You must poo a bucket of pips every night.

LAUGHTER

No, you adapt to it.

'But the Malling Centenary is not there yet.

'Here in the lab, it has to pass a battery of tests to check

'whether it can hold its own on the supermarket shelves.

'Today it's being assessed for taste, texture and durability.

'First up, taste.'

What we can do here is put a little drop of strawberry juice on there.

'Sugar levels are measured using a bit of kit

'called a refractometer.'

-You're making it up.

-Point it towards the light over there.

'Sainsbury's want them to score above 7% sugar content.'

Yeah, you've got about...

..seven-ish.

-Between seven and eight, I think, that one.

-Yeah, very good.

'It's a precise target.

'We prefer sweeter varieties,

'but strawberry plants can only produce a certain amount of sugar.

'The sweeter the strawberry,

'the fewer you tend to get from each plant.

'There's a trade-off between taste and quantity.'

-This is a balancing act, isn't it, all the time?

-Yeah.

'Next, its texture.

'If the strawberry's too hard, no-one will want eat it.

'They test it using something called a penetrometer.

'Ow!'

Wahey, I do like the look of that.

'Finally, have these berries got bounce?

'They need to be tough enough to withstand being transported

'halfway round Britain and still turn up looking their best.'

Why is it so important to you that the strawberries turn up

looking like they've been painted.

What's wrong with us?

Don't we like one that's a bit different shaped,

maybe a little softer?

If there's any point in the supply chain where there's a bit of damage or bruising,

it'll deteriorate really quickly and it's not going to look so good.

It simply won't last as long.

'Now, I've got one extra test -

'the Wallace taste test.'

See, I don't know whether...

I'm just going to be completely honest, right?

That is actually a damn fine strawberry.

'But it's not me they've got to convince.

'These strawberries still have to face their biggest challenge yet.'

The really important hurdle now to pass is

the general public in the taste test.

They're going to be the ones that decide

"Does this strawberry go onto the shelf?"

So, honestly, honestly, if they don't like it,

all that work's just up the Swanee?

Well, it means we have to go back to the drawing board

-and develop a different strawberry.

-I tell you, that's pressure.

Well, I'd no idea there was that much going on behind the scenes,

but that's because they're trying to produce a strawberry that

tastes OK, you can transport halfway round the country

and it will last for over a week.

I mean, a better-flavoured strawberry

would be a soft one that rots a lot quicker.

But that's not how we shop any more, is it?

'We'll be back to see how this little fella

'fares against some of the fruitiest palates in Britain.'

What we buy is hugely influenced by the weather,

and no more so than in summer.

When the sun comes out,

our food shopping habits change just as quickly as our outfits do.

The barbie comes out and we go mad for meat.

A ten degree rise in the temperature

sees a 300% increase in the sales of burgers and sausages.

And we want salads.

45% more lettuce and 50% more coleslaw.

Sales of ice cream absolutely rocket.

But only until the temperature gets to 25 degrees.

When it gets hotter, we all start buying lollies to quench our thirst.

Soft drink and lager sales go through the roof,

but we still have a favourite hot drink.

The British public, they cut down on coffee and they turn to tea.

And we want to look our best, as well.

I mean, it's not really my thing,

but apparently sales of hair removal products

go up by an enormous 1,400%.

We all know how unpredictable a British summer can be but

as soon as the sun comes out,

we expect to have these products already on our shelves.

So, how do the supermarkets stay one step ahead of the weather?

The secret is prediction programming.

Crack teams of data analysts use supercomputers to build

a model of exactly what we'll buy when.

'Treeva Fenwick from Tesco is going to show me

'how accurate these forecasts can be.'

We've got five years worth of historical sales data in there,

so for every single product, for every store,

for every day of the week.

And what we do, is we enter weather data in three times a day,

because weather really affects what people buy.

And it crunches all the numbers, does the sums

and what it comes up with is a really accurate way of forecasting.

So, this computer is analysing every single line on the shelf,

depending on what time of year it is, what the weather's going

to be like and what events may occur?

-Yeah, in every store.

-In every store?

-Cos it's different in every store?

-Of course.

90 million sums a day, this computer does.

I don't care how big your computer is,

it's never going to be absolutely bang on.

The accuracy is quite surprising, actually.

If you look at this ice-cream forecast,

that's what we forecast over three months and, you can see,

it tracks almost identically with what we sold.

-The blue one is the forecast, the red one is the actual?

-Yes.

-And it's virtually bang on.

-Yeah.

You guys are a little bit scary.

It's the change of the weather.

So, for example, if you've had the fifth weekend in a row that's

25 degrees and lovely, you won't see a big peak in demand.

But it's the customers' first experience of that weather

is where you see the real spike.

And, actually, that can alter,

depending on which parts of the UK or the British Isles that you're in.

So, for example, in Scotland what we find is that barbecue buying

might be triggered at about 20 degrees Celsius,

but in the South, it might be 24 degrees Celsius.

Could you tell me who's going to win in the 3.30 up Haydock?

SHE LAUGHS Wish I could.

Well, there you have it.

The whole thing is controlled by one vast supercomputer.

But you know what amazes me?

I thought my shopping was purely on impulse,

but the supermarkets already knew I was going to do it.

'So one of the things many of us do in summer is light the barbecue.'

Over the last ten years,

Britain has become the barbecuing capital of Europe.

We now average over 120 million barbecues a year!

I've come to a barbecue festival in Brighton

to find out why we love them.

How did your barbecuing start and what's it like now?

My barbecuing started by getting the cheap meat from the supermarket

and going and sitting in a park with a big bottle of cider.

LAUGHTER

And now it's sort of moved onto maybe

I do cook a bit more properly, I make my own burgers.

Where are you from, sir?

I'm originally from the United States, North Carolina.

What's a North Carolina barbecue, as opposed to a British barbecue?

You slow cook the meats,

you season them, you roast them. It's delicious.

You are such show offs, aren't you, you Americans?

-Yes, we are.

-Such show-offs, aren't you?

If I had hair, that's how I'd have it.

LAUGHTER

More and more of us are having barbecues

and we're getting more adventurous in what we cook and,

of course, the supermarkets, they can see an opportunity.

The supermarkets are keen to sell us shortcuts to barbecuing success,

but making our lives simpler turns out to be a complicated task.

THUNDER RUMBLES

RAIN POURS

Jonathan Moore is Waitrose's executive chef.

He's been charged with creating a new barbecue range, something a bit

adventurous that might persuade us to upgrade from burgers and chicken.

And he's picked a typical British summer's day to do it.

Probably, between us all, 20, 25 years of cooking

and this is the first time we've done this, really.

So it's British, it's summertime, why not?

Since the 1990s, most of the major supermarkets have

taken on chefs to develop their own brand products.

Jonathan has worked in Michelin star restaurants, but today

he's swapped his kitchen for a bit of concrete in front of company HQ.

What better place to be?

I'm in Bracknell, in the rain, by the side of a busy motorway.

What a great place to be(!)

This is actually the start of a nine-month process to get

a new barbecue range to the shelves.

They've been scouring the globe to find

the best barbecue dishes and techniques.

At the moment, barbecue predominantly is about grilling.

So we cook over charcoal, we cook over direct heat.

But today, we're going to look at smoking and preserving

and cooking food in the ground, things like that.

We keep going back to "What if?"

So, what if we tried this, what if we did this?

Or what if we tried this different way of cooking the meat?

If you don't experiment, you end up with what you've always had before.

Now, to most of us, hot smoking, cooking underground

and wrapping our dinner in a muslin cloth

are well beyond our kitchen skills.

So Jonathan sees a market for fancy dishes you just

finish off on the barbecue.

It's almost like having a chef at home.

We're doing the complicated bit.

We're doing the "This is how you cook it" bit,

so you're finishing off at home.

OK, everybody. We're going to start. Do you want to gather round...

Before the public get a sniff of his eccentric cooking, he's trying

them out on developers, technicians and buyers from Waitrose.

This is really a whistle-stop tour.

So we're going to start in New Zealand.

It's a body!

At this stage of the game,

nothing too exotic or complicated is ruled out.

First up is a shoulder of pork cooked on heated rocks

and ash and then buried in the sand.

What we would look at from this is not necessarily trying to

build big sandpits in people's gardens. That's not the idea.

This is about simply retaining all the best bits of the meat.

Next, they're in the US,

smoking ribs with a North Carolina dressing.

Then it's off to Japan for chicken skewers.

They're all having loads to eat. Fantastic.

LAUGHTER

For a wet and windy day, there's a lot of blue sky thinking going on.

But would any of these dishes appeal to the public

and is the supermarket able to produce them on a mass scale?

In a few weeks' time,

Jonathan will have to get down to business with the buying team.

We'll find out later what happens

when his ambitious creations get a reality check.

We get through a lot of meat in barbecue season.

Between June and August, we buy nearly 60,000 tonnes of beef

from the supermarkets and we love our steaks.

We eat 55 million of them in the summer.

Whenever we pick a steak up out of the shop, we expect it to

look good, taste good and we expect it to remain fresh.

We all know raw meat is a tricky thing to handle,

so how do the supermarkets do it?

Whoa-ho-ho-ho!

Oh, my word! Is this all beef?

This is all beef.

-You see the beef of 4,500 cattle.

-My word!

Scotbeef process hundreds of thousands of

beef and lamb carcasses a year for the supermarkets.

Chief Executive Robbie Galloway produces meat for the masses.

Our total stock we would hold for our business

would be approximately £9 million.

You've got £9 million worth of cow in here?

-And this is only one shed.

-This is only one chamber.

-We've got two other chambers.

-You're kidding?

You are kidding? There's not that many cows in the world!

The next stage is all about speed.

'Robbie's challenge is that,

'as soon the meat leaves this giant chiller,

'it starts to deteriorate faster

'so it's a race against time to process it as quickly as possible.'

My word! What is this?

This is our main butchery, Gregg.

'It's not just about speed.

'Robbie's 50 butchers also have to be incredibly accurate.'

-I would have thought that they'd have been machine cut.

-No.

Most of our steaks are hand butchered.

We get that because we've got skilled butchers.

They can cut steaks to fixed weights of 200 grams a steak.

They've all got to cut 200 grams every time?

That's the secret.

If they cut over 200 grams, then we call it "giveaway", and it can

cost the company thousands and thousands of pounds a week.

'200 grams is a typical steak portion across the supermarkets.

'It's a good thickness for cooking.

'Any thinner, and it could easily burn.'

So, would you like to have a shot?

-Really?

-Yes.

-Have a shot and see how good you are.

-I'd love to have a go.

Gregg, here's your fob.

GREGG LAUGHS

200 grams.

-Rubbish.

-No, rubbish.

-Rubbish.

-Ain't that funny?

-Have another shot. Have another shot.

No!

Oh, it's getting worse!

Whoa!

Whoa-ho-ho! Back of the net!

How much do you think I would have cost the firm?

Well, you probably wouldn't be allowed to do the job

for very long - cutting that range.

I made a right mess of that, but these guys are like human scales.

They cut at least 500 steaks a day.

No matter how fast these guys cut, though,

the steaks are still losing freshness all the time.

But they found a way to slow down the decay.

The next step of the process is to get them packed as quick as we can.

The steak goes into a pack, it gets vacuum-packed.

This is a new form of packing we've started doing.

It's called skin wrap.

'You might have noticed your meat being packaged differently.

'The supermarkets started skin-wrapping meat around 2000.

'They vacuum pack it to get rid of the oxygen.

'It's oxygen that gives meat its red colour,

'what we've always seen as freshness.

'But, actually, oxygen causes meat to go off.

'It makes fats go rancid and helps bacteria grow.

'Removing it keeps the steaks fresh for longer,

'but it does turn them purple,

'the colour they were before being exposed to the air.'

Here's the finished pack.

Look, I love steaks like that,

but people aren't used to buying them purple.

That's how meat looks after the oxygen has been taken away.

Naturally. I think there's lots of benefits.

We get more shelf life, 40% more shelf life, which is

good for the customer and the retailer.

It's worth remembering that the next time you're shopping for steak,

the bright red one is deteriorating

far faster than the purple one.

Earlier, I met Sainsbury's fruit and veg technical manager, Simon Hinks.

He's on a mission to find a new variety of our summer favourite,

the strawberry.

Today, his berry is about to face a crucial test.

I've come to a food research centre in Gloucestershire,

where Simon's strawberry will face a customer taste panel.

Eight years it's taken to develop

this strawberry for the supermarket

and, today, the British public might decide that that strawberry

never ever makes it onto the shelf.

There's actually a lot of hush-hush work

that goes on in this establishment.

This is where the supermarkets send their produce to be

trialled against the competition.

Please press the light...

The fate of Simon's strawberry lies in the hands of these people.

-Simon.

-Morning, Gregg, how you doing?

How are you doing, moreover?

Very good, very good.

So, this strawberry today is going to get tested and its results

are going to be compared to lots of others.

We'll compare it to the whole market.

Whoa! And how well has this strawberry got to score?

Where has it got to come in the league table?

There's no point in replacing a good strawberry

with the same kind of level of strawberry. This needs to be better.

Quite simply, if they don't like it, we're not going to launch it.

It's either "Abort, abort!" or it's, "Go, go, go!"

Absolutely right. It's an exciting day, isn't it?

It is. It really is.

And this thing looks so innocent.

You wouldn't think that all this goes behind the background

of just simply getting a new strawberry onto the market.

Have you any idea how much trouble you've caused?

'Most products we eat from the supermarkets have been

'through a similar process.

'Around 20% of new products fail at this stage.'

Well, I know a thing or two about tasting

and taste is a very subjective business.

So, how do you take something so subjective

and make it scientific?

Well, first of all, you have to control the environment that

the testers work in, so the colour is completely neutral.

Even the lighting is very stark. No smells.

They extract all the odours and the temperature

and humidity has got to stay constant.

Even the questionnaire itself is designed not to lead

the testers in any way.

And the next thing you need to control, of course, is your testers.

Now, they're not allowed to eat spicy food or drink coffee.

They're not even allowed to wear perfume or aftershave.

And, if they're feeling unwell or they're on medication,

they're not allowed to test.

'But I think there's only one person feeling unwell at the moment.'

You look like a man who's expecting his first baby.

It feels a little bit like that, if I'm honest.

You're sort of sitting thinking,

"This is a really big moment,

"it's a really important moment, and it's out of my hands."

Running the tests is consumer test manager Janetta Hylands.

Cool.

You've got a load of people behind there munching strawberries, haven't you?

We have, we have.

But they're not any old people.

They are what we call naive consumers.

So people from the street.

They're selected because of their age, or their gender,

-or their shopping or purchasing habits.

-What do you try to do?

-Get a cross-section of shoppers?

-We are, yes.

A cross-section of the nation.

'So this is about us and what we want from our strawberries.'

-How many ways of judging a strawberry are there?

-Many ways.

I mean, today we're looking at the appearance, the flavour

and the texture of strawberries.

How many questions would there be on how it looks?

I think we've got three or four questions on the appearance

and the same for the flavour and the same for the texture.

There aren't nine questions you can ask about a strawberry.

There are. There are.

Look at the appearance.

Look at the size of the strawberry.

Look at the colour of the strawberry, the shape,

how clean they look.

If you are going to put a strawberry in your mouth,

you'd want it, obviously, to look nice.

You wouldn't want an ugly, little, dirty strawberry,

you'd want it to look really nice.

Here's your strawberries.

It takes 40 judges 2 hours to give their scores.

So, now what? What happens next?

They start crunching numbers here at Campden.

They'll give us the information around what the scores are, how the product's performed

and get all those verbatim comments laid out for me.

And that'll take a few days.

-Oh, no!

-Yes. Still more awaiting, I'm afraid.

'Three weeks later

'and I'm at Sainsbury's HQ in Holborn, London, to find out

'whether Simon's strawberry has made the grade with the public.'

It's weird. Even I'm nervous, so I can only guess how Simon's feeling.

Ho, ho, ho, ho!

-Hello, Gregg.

-How are you, mate?

Very well. How are you doing?

-I'm a bit nervous.

-Yeah, me too, me too.

So you're waiting on this e-mail. When's it due in?

Well, is due at half past one, so it should be sat there right now.

Oh, you're kidding me.

-No. Shall we have a look?

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-Right.

-You haven't seen this, have you?

-I haven't, no. No.

OK, here we go.

That's the result just there, Gregg.

-So, that's fantastic news.

-Win.

-That's a win.

But it's both flavour and overall liking.

No, you can see from my face. I mean, from that perspective,

it couldn't be any better.

That's saying that, compared to

the current variety that we had tested,

we've won on both parameters, which is great news.

Really great news.

-Well done, mate.

-Thank you very much.

Yeah, over the moon, over the moon.

So, that's it.

Simon's finally got his new strawberry.

After eight long years,

what we're going to see now is a ridiculously fast scaling up

as he tries to get millions and millions

of strawberries on our shelves in time for the summer.

A big supermarket can stock over 30,000 items,

up to 50,000 in one of the massive ones.

But, how many items do think you buy in a year?

'I've come to meet Nick Gray, a retail marketing specialist

'who helps supermarkets understand us shoppers and how we behave

'when faced with thousands of different product lines.'

Do we honestly buy this many lines?

I mean, individually and as a family, how many lines do we buy?

There's thousands in here.

A typical UK family might buy between only 200 and 300.

'Just 5% of the products in a large supermarket

'generate around half the store's income.

'Red, white wine and lager are what we spend most on.

'Milk, Cheddar cheese, chocolate

'and cat food all make it into the top ten items we buy most often.

'With most of their income coming from a few items,

'why do the supermarkets bother stocking so many products?'

SCANNER BEEPS

What might be in your 200 or 300 is a bit different to

the next family's 200 or 300.

And if there's something you want that isn't in stock,

then there's nothing more annoying than that.

So that's why they have to have such a huge range of products.

Is there such a thing as too much choice?

Well, there'd be too much choice in an area where we're not interested

and we don't NEED a choice.

For example, you could think about sink unblockers.

There's probably two or three in here and you don't need ten.

But tea, for example, a great British favourite,

there's about a hundred different tea varieties here.

But it's very personal. So I only drink one type of tea by one brand

and that's all I'll have, but you'll be different.

So you've got to offer the whole lot.

Shoppers vote with their feet and they wouldn't be stocked

if they weren't being bought.

And we don't want to dictate too much to the shoppers what

we think they should be eating. Surely it's up to them.

So there you have it.

For every product line we select in a year,

the supermarket stocks at least a hundred others

that we won't even touch.

That's what it takes for us all to get the things that we want.

I'm following Britain's supermarkets season by season to discover

how they bring us our food and each season gives the supermarkets

the opportunity to try to tempt us with something new.

Sainsbury's want to use summer

to launch a new range of ready meals,

something that suits alfresco dining in the sunshine.

Ready meals is a huge market.

Last year, we bought almost 600 million of them.

But coming up with a new recipe isn't as easy as you think.

When it comes to ready meals, we are pretty much stuck in our ways.

The third most popular, chicken tikka masala.

The second most popular, cottage pie.

But, the most popular, without a doubt...

..is lasagne.

We spent £85 million on lasagne last year.

That list hasn't changed for five years.

So to get us to try something new,

the supermarkets have a battle on their hands.

They need to spot how our tastes are changing

and what new flavours we might be interested in.

One way they do it is right up my street.

Today, I'm going to have a look at what many people consider

to be the best job in supermarkets.

Good afternoon.

'I'm at a trendy restaurant in London to meet Susi Richards,

'Sainsbury's head of product development

'and product developer Romilly Edelmann.

'Susi signs off all Sainsbury's own brand food.

'She is one of the most influential women in British supermarkets

'and, today, they're here to check out the latest fashions in food.'

You are trying to identify the food trends

-and just get slightly in front of them.

-Absolutely.

We're trying to identify some of those emerging trends,

emerging flavours and bring them to our customers.

So, you need to go out to the smartest restaurants

to find out what the best of food looks like, is that right?

Yeah. We don't just go to the really smart places, either.

So today, we're here, but we'll

also go to lots of high street chains

that our customers go to.

'Many supermarkets send out taste teams like this to try

'and tap into hot trends.

'And Susi and Romilly think Spanish cuisine is one to watch.'

-And why Spanish?

-Sharing plates are really growing in popularity.

I think, in the UK, it's become much more about informal eating.

There's lots of different tastes to be able to sample

and try lots of different foods in one go.

So I'm sitting here, I'm eating, but you are scientifically

breaking this dish apart and sending it through a factory.

We're here because we want to create a range of tapas dishes,

and how we then replicate that for 23 million customers a week.

The challenge for us would be to present those products

alongside these and for you not to be able to tell the difference.

Whoa! That's a big boast!

Now, I know Sam, the chef here.

Sam, are we able to borrow you for a moment?

I've got a question I want to ask you on camera,

if that's all right. Nothing rude.

-Take a seat, chef.

-Yes.

Is it possible to recreate a chef's food

thousands and thousands of times and make it mass market?

I hope not.

That's what I thought you'd say.

Personally, I would have never have made the link between top end

restaurant and supermarket.

But they are scrutinising everything that is happening in the food world.

The supermarkets are seeing what they can use, what they can nick.

'I enjoyed my lunch, but there's no hanging about.

'We're off for another.

'Over the course of a day,

'these ladies can sample over 30 dishes.'

How have you not put on so much weight?

It sounds terrible, but normally

you do quite a lot of spitting,

so you don't necessarily eat everything that you taste.

So we can be doing quite a lot of tasting day in, day out.

So you don't eat everything.

'People like Susi have a huge influence over what we get to eat.

'She's responsible for making sure 1,500 new products

'get to the shelves each year.'

Do you think there is something particular or even slightly odd

about you and food that's made you good at this?

I think it's probably my obsession.

You can show me a product...

I have a very bad memory for most things,

I don't remember a lot of facts.

However, I do remember products.

So I always think it's quite difficult for the team,

cos they'll show me a product at a certain stage and then,

if that product changes in any tiny little way, I will remember.

I remember every small detail.

I'll remember the number of prawns in the fishcake.

The scouting mission is over.

The next stage for their Spanish ready meal range

happens at Sainsbury's HQ.

There are three floors here of test kitchens, assessment rooms

and food libraries.

This is where the supermarkets take cutting edge,

trendy restaurant food and turn it into mass-market.

In here, they test all 10,500 Sainsbury's own brand products.

They have over 100 chefs, home economists and food technologists.

'In one of their development kitchens,

'chef Nicola is cooking up Spanish dishes.

'They want to give them a supermarket twist.'

Smells good.

We are cooking up a new tapas range

which we're developing, which

we're then going to do a sampling review with the product developers.

And how difficult are this lot?

SHE LAUGHS

Not at all.

What have we got then? How many are we working on now?

We normally start with about 20 to 25 ideas and then,

as we go through the development process, it all filters down.

I saw this one in the restaurant, didn't I?

I mean, that squid is cooked to absolute perfection.

How are you going to guarantee that goes out as good as that?

Turning THAT into food for thousands is not at all easy.

I agree. For me, the finish of the product is really important.

And to be able to recreate that in the factory and obviously to give

the product the life that it needs, as well, that's the challenge.

We're only just at development stage

and you can see how the dish is morphing away from restaurant

food and it's becoming something that will suit the supermarket.

I'm fascinated to see what happens next.

'I'll be back later to see what it takes to make Mediterranean

'meals supermarket style.'

We like to get a bit fruity in the sun

and strawberries might bring in the most money for supermarkets

during the hotter months,

but there's actually a fruit that we eat more of.

In fact, we get through 1.5 billion of them every summer.

Bananas!

# Yes! We have no bananas

# We have no bananas today... #

'They're one of the supermarkets' bestselling products,

'so the phrase, "Yes, we have no bananas,"

'are words that none of them want to hear.

'Tesco's technology boffins have devised a clever way to make

'sure the song never comes true.

'Mike McNamara heads up the team.'

A store like this one will sell over half a tonne of bananas every day.

So, at busy times, that's like a banana through

the checkout every 15 seconds.

So, if you're not paying absolute attention, it's very,

very easy to let the shelf run empty.

They're trialling a new banana alert.

The checkouts will send an automatic message to shelf stackers

if a banana hasn't gone through the tills in five minutes.

This is a bit of technology we're working on. It's a smart badge.

We can send an alert down to the member of staff

on the smart badge to say, "Go fill up the bananas."

'The plan is to use this auto alert system

'for all bestselling products.'

Bananas. Really important to the supermarkets.

But we are quite a picky bunch when it comes to buying bananas.

We don't want them too green and we don't want them with any brown.

So, how do the supermarkets get them just right?

'Here at Portsmouth docks,

'the mother of all banana boats has just arrived.

'Even if we ever got a good British summer,

'we can't grow bananas commercially here,

'so they have to be transported from halfway around the world.

'This entire ship is jam-packed with boxes of our favourite fruit.

'Kevin Retford is banana technical manager for The Co-operative.'

It's a noisy business, isn't it, this banana lifting?

Absolutely.

Where are these bananas from?

This actual consignment, Gregg, is from Colombia.

How many bananas have you got on here, do you know?

There's 47 million bananas on the ship.

-That's nearly enough for one for everybody in the country.

-Yeah.

Is there any chance I can get down and have a look at these?

-Yeah, can't see why not.

-Really?

-Yeah, yeah.

'47 million bananas sounds a lot, but we Brits will munch through

'these in just three days and every single one needs to be

'in perfect condition when it reaches the shelves.

'The trick to making that happen began when these bananas were

'first put on the boat in South America 11 days ago.'

If I kept a banana in my fruit bowl for ten days, it would be

-a complete black mush.

-Absolutely.

I mean, if you look at these now,

they're looking like cucumbers more than bananas.

-So, how have they stayed dark green?

-Because they're asleep.

The fruit when it was loaded, it's been temperature controlled

and it will be kept at a steady temperature, 13 degrees,

all the way until it comes back into here and we open the lid up.

As soon as you get them to 13 degrees, they stop ripening?

-Absolutely.

-They're just snoozing.

So, for two weeks, as long as you keep the temperature right,

-you've got a lot of sleeping...

-We don't want to wake it up yet.

A banana will stay green until it produces a gas called ethylene,

or receives a dose of it from other bananas.

Tiny pores in the skin of the banana let the gas in and out.

As you cool the banana, it holds off producing ethylene

and the pores close, stopping any of the gas getting in.

So the banana stays asleep.

Forgive me, but you've now taken the roof off,

so the sunlight's going to get to it, start ripening.

This fruit has got to move and move fast.

'Bananas are sensitive to extreme changes in temperature,

'so they need to be unloaded

'and put back into a controlled environment as quickly as possible.'

What happens if the bananas get too cold?

If they get too cold, the bananas will go grey.

-What if they get too hot? They start to ripen?

-They start to ripen.

Once they start on that process, it's irretrievable.

You can't stop them again.

'They want to control the ripening

'and that happens in specialist centres,

'like this one in Basingstoke.

'Britain needs 11 of these to meet our banana habits.

'Paul Barrett is a banana supply manager for Fyffes.'

-What are these?

-Each one of these is a ripening chamber for bananas.

-Wow!

How many bananas does each chamber hold?

Depending on which bays we're are using, five to ten million.

Let's open up the door.

Three floors of bananas?!

Let's get some down for you.

-Wahey!

-There we are. These are not long off the ship.

Oh, my word. Aren't they beautiful?

-Beautiful, aren't they?

-Aren't they lovely?

So, what stage are they at now?

-Because they were asleep on the ship.

-They still are.

We need to wake these up and then control the ripening cycle

so we can get them ready on the day that the Co-op want them.

And how do you do that?

We use a bit of ethylene, which is the product that

the bananas would produce on their own if left to their own devices.

But we put a little bit into the ripening chamber.

It's only 600 parts per million, a tiny amount,

just enough to kick-start them and start that ripening.

'By adding ethylene artificially,

'they can ripen the bananas to their timetable.

'It triggers reactions which turn starch in the fruit into sugar.

'The more sugar, the riper the banana.'

People say if you want to ripen up another fruit, put it in

a bag with a banana, because the banana gives off ethylene.

-And that's what you're injecting into the room?

-We are.

Most fruits will give off ethylene, but bananas are particularly

good at producing ethylene as part of the ripening process.

So put them with your unripe tomatoes, bring them on like that.

This is the ethylene generator. Just stand back a little.

Ethylene is a natural product,

and we've got a little bit of it in this container.

They would ripen up if you left them on their own.

They would, but they would ripen at different rates.

We've got a quarter of a million bananas in this one chamber.

We would have bananas at different states of ripeness.

How do you sell them off the shelf?

What we call in clusters or hands, Gregg.

-So they can't all be different colours, can they?

-No, no.

-We want them all consistent colour.

-We've got to put that in there?

-We have.

-I'm just about to wake up these little darlings!

Come on! Rise and shine!

Daddy's here! Come on!

HE LAUGHS

-That's it. He's in.

-That's it.

Now you've triggered the ripening process by introducing

the ethylene, there's no going back.

'It takes between four to eight days for the bananas to ripen

'and they're finally ready for the supermarket shelves.'

This is a hive of activity. What's going on here?

This is our packing and colour checking line

and we're producing some bananas for the Co-op, here.

-Colour checking?

-Yes.

If you look at this fruit now against the colour chart,

we're around this area here.

And so, by the time they get into store,

it should be with a target colouration

of that when it gets to stores.

But I do get frustrated that

I can't actually buy a ripe banana anywhere.

Yeah, I understand where you're coming from.

If we were to put the fruit too forward,

it's going to cause food waste.

So I've got to ripen them myself at home, really.

Well, that's what statistics are telling us.

That's what our consumers want.

Do you know what?

I've been dealing with fruit and veg and bananas for over 20 years

-and I have found today absolutely fascinating.

-Oh, good.

-Absolutely fascinating. I've loved it.

-Good.

I had no idea that you could actually order them

as ripe as you wanted. So next time I go shopping for bananas,

I'm taking my own colour chart.

It's five weeks since Waitrose had their barbecue brainstorm.

It's a body!

The chefs started with 50 ideas,

they've chosen 25 to take to the next stage.

It's time to decide if they make business sense.

We exploded loads of ideas, you know - cooking in a pit.

Now we've kind of honed it in and really would

appreciate your feedback on things like the Japanese stuff...

Executive chef Jonathan Moore

is pitching to the barbecue buying team.

Do you want a little taste of the sauces on their own, first?

Cos it's a really good indication as to what it goes with and why.

I need their feedback now and say, "What do you think?"

Cos they're really close to their customers.

They know what the customer really likes, what the customer wants to buy.

It's quite a mild, smoked flavour,

considering it's been smoked for so long,

rather than a liquid smoke,

or that quite acrid, artificial flavour.

Jamie Matthewson looks after 200 products

and a turnover of more than £100 million a year.

There's quite a bit of pressure

on the barbecue buyer to get barbecue right.

That's pretty key.

'The pressure on me is to try and increase our market share,

'deliver a different range.

'But what he can create in a kitchen with really talented chefs is

'sometimes not what we can create on a large scale.'

This is the point where they really start picking the dishes apart.

They have to make a good return on investment

and Jamie's not convinced about the Argentinian meat roll.

You know, a rolled flank would be really tricky to do,

tricky to do that by hand.

Is that going to take up six or seven hours of factory time

when we want to be getting burgers out?

Chicken on lemongrass...

He's not won over by Japanese kebabs, either.

In summer, just at a peak time for chicken, we're then asking them,

"Yeah, we'd like some one centimetre diced yakitori skewers,

"which are going to be hand done on line."

So we've got to take all of that into consideration.

So, which dishes do work?

Well, American slow-cooked barbecue pork

is one that's caught Jamie's eye.

Pulled pork I think is a really great product,

because it's really difficult to do at home.

And with the slow-cooking process, I think

we can develop that into a really, really superb product.

The clue as to why slow-cooked barbecue pork might be

a contender is here, Dalehead,

a meat processor in Wiltshire.

Six weeks on, Jamie's here to check a factory test batch.

If you want to give me a hand to load up.

So when we go into production, we'll be

looking at upscaling this from 60 kilos at the moment to,

when we're selling it at the peak of barbecue season,

we should be selling about two tonnes.

That's 5,000 packs a week.

And the reason Jamie's so keen on this dish is it lets him

use cheaper cuts of meat, so he can keep the price of the product down.

It's all to do with the slow-cooking.

The meat is smoked for an hour,

then put in a steam cooker for another ten hours.

It makes tough meat, like this pork shoulder, tender.

Mark Williams is Dalehead's development manager.

Pork shoulder is a particular joint that lends itself to slow-cooking.

Those are parts of the animal that tend to work more, so the muscle

does more work and, by nature, will have more muscle fibres in it.

Hard-working muscles contain lots of collagen,

a stringy protein which makes meat chewy.

When cooked for a long time,

the collagen breaks down and turns into a more edible gelatine jelly.

This solves a problem for Jamie.

It's great for us, because it helps us manage the animal better.

So rather than going out to the market and buying a million legs,

we go out to the market and buy a million pigs.

So the legs are taken care of in the ham, that leaves me

with shoulders that I need to use up.

This is a great way of utilising all of that meat,

making sure there's no waste.

So slow-cooked pork is a favourite because it uses up spare meat.

It's still to get final sign off from the bosses,

but the factory tests look positive.

Ten hours they've been in there cooking.

So if you stand back, Jamie.

Jamie's confident it'll become one of 12 dishes

in Waitrose's new barbecue range.

'Sainsbury's are also well down the line with their

'new Spanish ready-meal range.

'It's five months and I dined out with their development team.

'They set out to make supermarket meals as good as restaurant food.

'The team have signed off on factory test versions of the dishes.

'They're now at the next crucial stage and it happens here,

'at their Waltham Point depot in Essex.'

Apparently, I'll get a chance to

taste the dishes they've come up with.

But first, they have to go for a true test, to see

if they can cope with the rigours of supermarket life.

'Carrying out today's tests are product developer Romilly Edelmann

'and packaging technologist Jane Skelton.'

Ladies! Hey, you did it! This is it, is it?

That was months ago we started looking at this.

What did you end up with?

This one's chicken and chorizo paella.

-And then we've got a smoked paprika marinated calamari.

-Whoa!

These products have been made by our suppliers in their factories

as a trial and then we're today here at the depot

to follow the transit trial.

What's a transit trial?

A transit trial is where we replicate what happens to

the products through normal distribution.

So they'll go round the conveyor belts here,

will go into the back of a lorry, go to a store and then we'll go

and have a look and see that they've turned up in one piece at the store.

So, what now? Put it on the conveyor belt?

-Put it on to the conveyor belt.

-Oooh!

Ready?

'Not only do these terracotta-style pots have to do stand up

'to our microwaves, ovens and fridges,

'they also need to survive life on the move.

'In the depot, products are whizzed around on these conveyor belts.

'This is where deliveries from suppliers are divided up to

'go to individual stores.

'They test hundreds of new products a year to check

'the packaging is up to the punishment

'and that the contents look presentable at the end.'

So you're looking for any breakages in the packaging at all.

Is the film still sealed? Has the cardboard been ripped?

Is there any cracking? But these are absolutely fine.

-So, what do we do now?

-We'll get them onto the cage

-and take them over to the loading bay.

-Off you go.

'They carry out these tests before the end of development.

'Any problems could hold up full production,

'so they need to identify them early.

'Next, they're loaded onto trucks to see how

'they cope with transport to a shop.'

There they are, look.

Fantastic. None have smashed.

All the seals are still intact. Oh, look. This one isn't actually.

-Oh, that's one's ripped!

-That one's ripped. Oh, dear.

-Oh!

So we've got something there we need to work on.

Anything could contaminate the product,

so someone's hand could go in it.

It's just not great.

You have a look on your face like a little boy whose ice cream's

-just fallen out of his cornet.

-I know, a little bit disappointing.

Is this time for you to go outside

with a service revolver, or is this fixable?

We just need a review just for how long they've had

the sealer on top of that and how hot they've had it

to make sure that it's at the right time and temperature

and the right amount of pressure.

Cos it feels like one of them is wrong.

But I suppose that is the point of a trial.

The point of doing a trial is that we iron out all these problems.

'The final test is an authentic shopping experience.

'Every week, they lug bags of new products by bus, tube,

'car or on foot, just like a typical shopper.

'Back at Sainsbury's HQ,

'it's time to see how close they've got to restaurant quality food.

'Susi Richards, head of own brand product development,

'is here to do a final tasting with me.

'First up, it's the paella.'

It's decent home stuff.

It wouldn't make a restaurant table.

It kind of mellows along on one flavour

with little ripples of other flavours.

It's perfectly acceptable

without being worthy of writing home about it.

'So, let's see how they've got on with the calamari.'

Lovely, thank you very much. Shall we get rid of the paella?

-That's amazing.

-Fantastic.

Personally, I would put more garlic on it, maybe a bit of chilli.

But the texture of the squid is perfect.

How do you get squid cooked that perfectly ring after ring?

We steam it. So we've done a lot of work understanding what the right

time and temperature of the steam is,

but essentially it's just a simple steam.

Cooking squid at home, you'd fry it, high temperature, really quickly.

Why don't you do that?

It's harder for us to control the texture.

So the biggest challenge for us is making sure the product

tastes the same every single time and by steaming it, that's easier.

I tell you what, I am really, really impressed.

-It's good, isn't it?

-Who'd have believed that?

'These dishes have had to tick a lot of boxes

'to earn their place on the supermarket shelves.

'It's an 11 month process to get

'15 products ready for their new range.

'Everything I've seen is such a different way to

'think about food than I'm used to.

'I've had a real insight into why some products make it

'and others don't,

'And the amount of work it takes -

'years of research, clever science,

'even predicting the weather and our buying habits.

'Coming soon, how the supermarkets get set for autumn.

'I'll find about a revolution in British apples...'

How is a small boy supposed to climb that?

I don't think you've thought this through, have you?

'..discover the truth about own brand pies...'

-Are they all made in the same place?

-Ah.

'..and I'm let in to a hidden supermarket world.'

It's like a supermarket, but it's got none of the thrills.

-It's got no special offer banners...

-We've got no customers.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd