Christmas Supermarket Secrets Supermarket Secrets

JAUNTY MUSIC

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!

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 CHUCKLES

It's a massive operation.

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

I'm tracking it season by season.

And this time it's Christmas.

And the supermarkets are gearing up for their biggest

challenge of the year.

I'll see what it takes to deliver millions of turkeys.

There's hours and hours worth of work here.

I hate turkeys.

Find out about the battle to make sprouts a crowd pleaser.

Lots of bitterness. Lots of iron.

Oh, that's like drinking petrol.

And reveal how they make sure, we've got

enough of our favourite Christmas tipple.

That's like a great big paddling pool.

Supermarkets have a huge influence over our everyday lives,

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

MUSIC: "Winter Wonderland" by Dean Martin

Winter.

The days are short and the temperature's plummeting,

but at least there is one thing for us to look forward to -

Christmas is coming,

and for supermarkets that makes winter their most important season.

Christmas is make or break for them.

A good one can be the difference between a bad and a successful year.

We spend nearly £8 billion in the supermarkets in December.

And go through the checkouts over 100 million

times in the final week.

No wonder it's murder out there.

I try to get out of it whenever I can.

What do you hate about Christmas shopping?

Crowds. Too many people.

The last-minute shop where you realise you've forgotten

something and you have to go out on Christmas Eve and that's murder.

What's your idea of Christmas shopping heaven?

Send the missus.

HE CHUCKLES

Well, I suppose Christmas food shopping is just something

we've just all got to get through.

But if it's a headache for you, imagine the supermarkets.

They've got to deal with not one Christmas dinner,

50 million of 'em.

In the week before Christmas,

food sales go up a whopping 36%.

Meeting that demand tests the supermarkets'

logistics to the absolute limits.

So how do they make sure we don't show up to find empty shelves?

BEEPING

MUSIC: "Also Sprach Zarathustra" by Richard Strauss

For a start, they need places like this.

Oh, my word!

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

Welcome to one of the biggest distribution depots in Britain.

I'm standing in a half-mile long building,

it has 1,200 workers and over four miles of conveyor belts.

It supplies Sainsbury's stores around London.

The man in charge is Baden Morton.

Have we got food going out at this pace,

24 hours a day, seven days a week?

Yeah. Yeah.

Although today is a busier day than normal, of course.

It's the weekend before Christmas.

Festive food is coming in from 500 suppliers,

and is being divvied up for individual branches.

This is a machine called a sorter and we're picking,

we're preparing the orders to send to the shops.

So each of these chutes represents a store.

That's right and we have 89 stores all the way

round at the moment.

Barcodes on each product tell the system which store chutes to

send it down.

Christmas is flying by. 300 boxes a minute.

All our smoked salmon, cheese, butter, the lot.

I think I've just seen the cream for my Christmas pudding go past there.

Yeah, you name it, we supply it.

The supermarkets now have over 100 distribution

depots around the country.

They've become the heart of a network that connects

the supplier to the store.

And to our shopping baskets.

Can I ask you, seriously, when everybody else is looking

forward to Christmas, are you starting to get worried?

Yes! For months beforehand. Definitely.

If any of the UK's depots went into meltdown,

our Christmas dinners would be in jeopardy.

But to make sure that doesn't happen,

this one has its own mission control.

This is the...belly of the beast.

BADEN CHUCKLES

Hello, guys.

And what we've got over here are, some of the guys who actually

control the automation from up here, just introduce you here to Ben.

'Ben is the very thin, fat controller of the depot.

'From his crow's nest, he monitors every chute,

'belt and worker to keep this place running.'

What on earth is that?

A whole lot of fun, my friend.

Each of these screens represents a bit of this enormous warehouse.

-Correct.

-You are the eye in the sky.

-Definitely.

What can block our Christmas here?

At any one moment, you can get, ten, 20 faults, sort of hit

you all at once, and it's knowing in what order to call those faults in.

If we do get a red mark, if we do get a block, what do you do then?

Got a team of jam-busters, they're there to clear any blockages

or faults that may happen around the sortation system.

The belts, the inducts and such.

-They're the International Rescue of the food chains.

-Spot on. If anything, yeah...

-You've got one, you've got one, there's red.

-There you go.

That's an induct, that's where the work's fed on, we've got

a fault in there.

A box of cream hasn't scanned properly.

The sorter has stopped

because it doesn't know what to do with the box.

It's time for Ben to deploy the jam-busters.

Hello, Al.

Just, mate, could you pop along to the blockage on PLC 17, please?

These depots are so vital to the way the supermarkets operate today,

they can't afford any hold ups.

Hello Alan, is it all clear, mate?

'Yeah, yeah, all clear.'

The depot is running late with its orders today.

There are two huge electronic boards that show the workers whether

they are delivering Christmas on time, or slipping behind.

So although it's saying it's in red, it's also saying gaining,

so the situation's improving.

I suppose you could call it a motivation tool,

it allows us to tell the guys how things are going.

I wouldn't look at that and think, "Oh, good old Ben's up there

"looking after me." I would think, "Ben's down there looking at me!"

That is not comforting, can I tell you.

What would be comforting - "Ben's gone home!"

I've been in the food business for decades,

but this is a whole new world for me.

I've never seen anything on this scale.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Behind all our festive food there's been months of planning

and preparation, and there are some products the supermarkets

absolutely have to get right.

One supermarket chain has what it calls red products.

That's things that they simply must have on their shelves

at Christmas, otherwise they're worried their customers will go

and shop elsewhere.

But one of these red must-have Christmas lines,

is something that we...love to hate.

-Do you like these?

-No.

-Do you like these?

-I hate Brussels sprouts.

-Do you like these?

-No.

-Do you like these?

-No, I hate them.

Do you like them? I'll carry on following you around.

Do you want to try one?

Yeah, not good.

If you don't like them, why do you have them at Christmas?

Tradition.

I have no idea, mate!

It's not a good idea, is it?!

What if I said you'd never have to have another Brussels sprout again at Christmas?

I'd probably be quite happy, to be honest, but my mum wouldn't be.

Sprouts have been a traditional Christmas veg for around 300 years.

But I'm struggling to find anyone who actually likes them.

This isn't easy, is it?

But there must be some secret sprout eaters amongst us.

Because at Waitrose alone,

Brussels sprout sales have gone up by nearly a third in the last year.

So, what's changed?

How have they brought us sprouts that we actually want to eat?

I've come to a colossal sprout farm in Lincolnshire to meet a man

with the answer.

Waitrose technologist Paul Yarrow has been part of a silent

revolution in sprouts.

It's mid November,

and today he's making sure his order for Christmas is on track.

But getting to him is no walk in the park.

Good morning to you, Gregg.

Morning, mate! This is fun.

-Good to see you.

-How you doing?

Very well, thank you.

What, what are we doing here, what are you doing here?

So, what's happening this morning is, all these sprouts are being topped.

These sprout plants are known as trees because they're so big

and tall.

Tearing the top part off the stem encourages them to put their energy

into the sprouts themselves, rather than making the plants taller.

And this helps make the sprouts all a consistent size.

The problem is, if it comes to...Christmas time,

a big sprout's going to cook a lot slower than a small sprout.

Right, of course. So you want them all the same size.

So what we want to do is encourage these smaller spouts to get

bigger, so they're all cooked at the same time.

This farm doubles its workforce in the lead-up to Christmas

and runs two ten-hour shifts a day.

I'm actually really impressed at the pace that these guys work.

They're good, they're using both hands

and walking down the field at a good pace, snapping all the tops out.

-That's quite incredible, isn't it?

-Yes.

-Can, can we join in?

Absolutely, Gregg, shall we get on the end? Yes.

So what you want to do is every top, just snap it off and drop it.

Supermarket food technologists like Paul are hands on.

He works with suppliers to choose what varieties get planted,

and regularly checks up on the crops.

It takes a special sort of breed of man who wants to wade

waist high in Brussels spouts, mate.

Absolutely!

Paul's big thing is taste, and for the last 13 years,

he's been part of a mission to find sprouts we'll love.

-So we're going to munch a couple, are we?

-Yes, Gregg.

So, what I do when I come out to the fields is we're looking at crops in

the field, seeing how they're growing, but what we want to make sure

is that the flavour and the taste is good as well as the appearance.

So, let me get this right, most of the time, you are knee deep

in wet sprouts, then you have to eat them?

That's the enjoyment of my job.

Get paid well do you, Paul?

I don't think well enough sometimes, Gregg.

Paul's job might not be the most glamorous,

but he knows all about our love-hate relationship with sprouts.

A lot of people are turned off by sprouts,

they think of sprouts as mushy, bitter and quite nasty

and actually the thing they leave on side of their roast.

The bitterness comes from a cluster of naturally-occurring

chemicals called glucosinolates.

These chemicals are part of the sprout's defence

mechanism against being eaten by animals and insects.

AND part of what we taste when we eat sprouts.

But they affect each of us differently.

Some people can taste that bitterness a lot stronger

-than others.

-It's a genetic thing?

-Absolutely.

Some people will taste a Brussels sprout and go,

"I can't taste any bitterness in it at all."

Others would actually screw their face up and spit it out.

All to do with genetics.

There are around 50 human genes which can influence how we

respond to the bitterness in sprouts.

Some of us have lots of these genes, others very few.

The more of these bitterness genes you have,

the more of the bitter qualities of a sprout you'll taste.

I have to confess, I'll stomach them, but I'm not a huge fan.

-Because of that bitterness of them?

-Yeah.

'I'm definitely sensitive to bitterness.

'Like lots of us, I've hated sprouts since I was a kid.

'Paul has a drink that will recreate the sprouts of my childhood.

'It's packed with the bitterness chemicals you find in sprouts.'

-So, cheers to you.

-Oh, that stinks!

Lots of bitterness, lots of iron.

Oh, that's like drinking petrol.

And that's a memory that's put you off sprouts in the past, I'm sure.

Oh, mate!

You may think that all sprouts are the same, but they're not.

In fact, suppliers use 25 different varieties to cover

the UK's seven-month sprout season.

In the 1990s, a crusade began to create newer,

sweeter varieties, and these sprout seeds are the result.

Scientists took sprout varieties that had the lowest

levels of bitterness, and bred them with each other.

The results were amazing.

By reducing the bitterness,

the hidden sweetness of the sprouts emerged,

and the sweet varieties are on the supermarket shelves over Christmas.

Are people aware they can get a less bitter sprout?

I think we've been doing work quietly about it,

and actually it's, it's softly, softly

so that, the, the bitter sprout has been going over several years,

and the sweeter sprout is coming in, and, hopefully what that

means is, the childhood memories of a bitter sprout and the screwed up face,

is going to be less because the sweeter flavour's coming through.

The development of sweeter sprouts is one reason why the sales

of this little green veg have gone up 30% in the last year.

'So, can Paul's sweet sprout win over a sprout-aphobe like me?'

Mmm. They are nowhere near as bitter.

That's like a sweet small cabbage.

-Absolutely.

-Fantastic.

-I'm pleased you've enjoyed them.

-No, no. I really did like them.

Got some butter?

Paul still has a nail-biting few weeks ahead.

He might have got more of us to like Brussels,

but getting them on our plates is no easy task.

I'll be back to see why this innocent-looking veg is such

a tricky customer.

For lots of us,

one of the things at the top of our Christmas shopping list is booze.

And the supermarkets are now where we buy most of it, especially wine.

Supermarkets have completely conquered the wine world.

40 years ago, they were just a small drop in the wine business.

Today, they sell a whopping great 84%

of the wine in Britain.

At Christmas, we spend 40% more than normal on wines.

Our favourites in the festive period are all white. Sparkling wines,

Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Grigio are the top sellers.

So, how do the supermarkets keep up with us?

It's three weeks before Christmas and in nearly 2,500

Tesco stores across Britain, they are

restocking their wine shelves, ready for the Christmas rush.

Dan Jago is the head of wine for Tesco.

-Busy day here.

-Very exciting day today.

-Why?

Beginning of Christmas.

We've got three actual weeks to go before Christmas, but, this is

the day where we really launch our final set of offers for customers.

We put a lot of new stuff on the shelves.

We take down some of the stuff that's probably not

relevant for the last two or three weeks.

Dan and his team us previous years'

sales data to identify exactly what we drink at Christmas.

Customers said, "On Christmas Day, we like to have something really special.

"If I've got the family coming round, I want to show them

"something a little bit different, a little bit extra."

-We get all posh at Christmas, do we?

-Exactly what we do. We get all posh at Christmas.

Their predictions are so precise, they know

we change what alcohol we buy each week in the lead-up to Christmas.

In early December, it's all about party time.

So they roll out the cases of beer and Cava.

But by mid December, their data shows we move towards buying posh

bubbles for the big day.

Roughly, how many wines are you in charge of here.

We sell at Tesco one in every four bottles of wine

consumed in the United Kingdom.

Including restaurants and hotels and everything else.

Oh, my word.

You must be the biggest wine buyer in Britain.

The world.

-You are the biggest wine buyer in the world.

-Yep.

In the UK, we spend more in the supermarkets on wine than

anything else.

But the supermarket shelf is not the natural home for a bottle of wine.

I thought wine was supposed to be kept in the cool and the dark,

but supermarket wine is on the shelf under hot lights.

It's a form of impact called light strike that causes the wine

to go off.

So you'll notice that the vast majority of white wines don't

actually come in clear glass bottles,

they come in this slightly off-set green bottle.

The other thing we do is we make sure the lights

we use in our supermarkets are of a certain sort.

Normal supermarket lights are fluorescent, and emit wavelengths

of light that over time can destroy the aroma and taste of wine.

So, in a lot of stores,

they fit yellower lights over the wines that are less destructive.

So, in the wine aisle, you'll see we've got slightly lower-intensity lights

than we've got elsewhere.

So these are the wine aisle lights, come here,

you've got a completely different sort of light. And it really makes a difference.

But the biggest headache for Dan is how to transport

millions of litres of wine across the world.

-What's a nightmare for you?

-Running out of stock.

The worst thing that could happen for me is we run out of stock,

and a lot of this wine's got to travel a very long way,

so we've got to order it four, five, six months in advance, so making the

right call in July for what you've seen today, that's quite difficult.

To make sure we can get the wine we want

when we want it, they've come up with some ingenious solutions.

MUSIC: "The Onedin Line Theme" by Aram Khachaturian

Like this.

Making its stately way down the Manchester Ship Canal is

Tesco's latest delivery of wine.

On the last stage of an epic 10,000 mile,

seven-week voyage from Australia.

I cannot believe,

you've got this much wine on the Manchester Ship Canal.

-Welcome to Manchester.

-Incredible!

Under our feet, how many litres of wine are there?

You could get 130 containers on board,

each one full of 26,000 litres of wine.

26,000 litres times 130?

-I can't do that maths.

-Me neither.

However, someone with a calculator has told me that this

boat can carry three and a half million litres of wine.

But the supermarket's secret isn't the quantity,

it's the fact that there's no glass involved.

All of this wine, there's not one single glass bottle.

Not unless the crew have got one down below in the galley but,

what we are doing is moving large volumes of wine as efficiently

and as carefully as possible around the world.

I've got visions of an old boy in Australia, a real artisan, filling

each and every bottle lovingly, that's not happening at all, is it?

No, it's not, Gregg, and not really any more.

Maybe 40 or 50 years ago, when you were a young lad but no,

not any more.

Once the wine is safely through customs,

Dan can reveal how he transports all this wine without any bottles.

GREGG CHUCKLES

There it is.

That's like a great big paddling pool.

Who knew? They're moving wine around the world in giant bags.

Come and have a look at this. Feel that.

Why is that so hard? It's like a piece of wood.

It starts off as a completely air-free small bag,

and you fill it up with nothing in it,

so there's no air in there at all, so it's in effect been

filled into a vacuum, so it's filled absolutely to tight capacity.

Nothing moves.

The liquid in there is in effect almost a solid mass

when it's being transported.

Bags are much lighter than bottles,

so they're cheaper to transport and they don't break.

And there's another big advantage.

Because they're so tightly filled,

they minimise the amount of oxygen the wine comes in contact with.

Too much oxygen can harm the colour, flavour and smell of the wine.

The bags are now drained into huge vats.

-So, this is an hour later.

-This is.

And, you can see that most of it's come out now.

It's only now that the precious cargo can go into bottles.

The supermarkets are doing this with high-volume

wine from all over the world.

From South America to Australia and South Africa.

Thanks to innovations like the giant bags, the wine

arrives in as good a condition as when it left the vineyards.

So, I'm including myself in this, that we drink a lot more wine and

we're much more knowledgeable now than we ever were in this country.

-Years ago we didn't bring great quantities.

-We didn't, we couldn't.

In the last 40 years, the wine industry's been revolutionised,

we're able to drink wines we could never have done

and more wines from further away that are clean

and fresh when they arrive on the shelf.

Ha-ha! Well, that is it.

The reason the supermarkets can supply us Brits

with wine from all over the world is not just amazing

logistics, it's enormous plastic bags.

HE CHUCKLES

Over the Christmas period,

supermarkets serve over 100 million customers.

And that can lead to something that us Brits love to hate.

Queuing.

You've done your shopping. You got to the tills.

The kids are climbing the walls or somebody else's are.

The last thing you want to find is a massive queue.

Well, thanks to some new smart technology, you're less likely to,

because they know you're going to head for the tills before you do.

MUSIC: "Somebody's Watching Me" by Rockwell

When queues start to build up, supermarkets try to keep us

happy by opening extra tills.

But spotting when it's getting chocker at the checkouts

isn't always easy in a crowded store,

so they employ an eye in the sky to help.

Mike McNamara is Tesco's head of technology.

So, these are infrared cameras, wee things that look like smoke detectors

above each of the checkouts, and what they're

doing is they're taking an infrared image of the checkout queues.

And when you'll see when somebody enters the frame,

like this lady here, coming along,

she's represented by this red dot which comes in and joins the queue.

And there another person has just walked through

and again joining the queue.

The data from these infrared cameras gives store managers a constant

readout of exactly how many people are waiting at the checkouts.

So they can try and tackle any tailbacks.

The cameras are also used by other supermarkets.

But Mike is now experimenting with something more ambitious.

Tackling the queues before they form.

A couple of our stores we're trying the infrared cameras over,

over the entrances, so to try and predict what the

queues are going to be in about a half-an-hour's time.

The entrance cams count our trolleys

and baskets as we walk into the store.

The system then uses the average time we spend shopping

to predict how many checkouts they will need to have open.

They've calculated that, with a trolley,

we'll take around 45 minutes to get through our shop.

But when we grab a basket, we're at the checkouts within ten minutes.

Except, it turns out, we're not so predictable.

You know, some people take 20 minutes,

some people bump into their mates and take an hour and a half,

so getting the mathematics right to predict what the queues

are going to be in a half an hour is really, really, really difficult.

So, they're not there yet, but pretty soon

we could well say goodbye to the great British queuing tradition.

In the supermarkets at least.

I'm on a mission to find out how the supermarkets source,

make and move our food in the run up to the biggest

event in the shopping calendar - Christmas.

More food goes through the checkouts during the festive period,

than at any other time of year.

And the food items we buy most of at Christmas are...

..at number three...

mince pies. At number two...

chocolates.

And at number one...

it's potatoes.

And there's another bestseller that wouldn't even have

registered on shopping lists when I was a kid.

Smoked salmon seems to be absolutely everywhere at this time of year.

Supermarkets have taken it from a rare luxury to something

that's a must-have on everybody's Christmas table.

40 years ago, smoked salmon was seriously hard to come by.

Now, we buy three and a half million packs of it in December alone.

The first thing you need to produce huge volumes of smoked salmon

is huge volumes of salmon.

So I'm on a special Christmas trip to the Scottish Highlands

to find out exactly how you produce salmon, to order, en masse.

I'm heading to a fish farm in Mallaig in the north west

of Scotland.

I'm here to meet Ally Dingwall,

the man responsible for fish welfare at Sainsbury's.

-Ally?

-Gregg.

-Hi, Gregg. Pleased to meet you.

-Good to meet you.

Very, very good to meet you.

Fish eggs?

These are salmon eggs.

So this is the start of the life cycle of Atlantic salmon.

That's actually salmon caviar.

We could have that now on a bit of crostini.

I wouldn't recommend that cos these guys are alive, you can see they've

got eyes, they're past that stage where you might want to eat them.

So this room...

has got about two million eggs in it.

That extrapolates potentially to about 8,000 tonnes of fish.

That's a lot of fish.

8,000 tonnes!

That is a big smoked salmon and scrambled egg breakfast.

-Yeah, it is yeah.

-That is phenomenal.

How long between egg and fish on a plate?

From hatching to harvest, we're looking at about three years.

So, for Christmas, in three years' time, it starts here.

You have to plan three years in advance?!

Yeah, pretty much that's it.

The growth of salmon farming has been meteoric.

Up until the late 1960s, all salmon

we ate in the UK was wild.

Since the '70s, salmon farms have sprung up

at an incredible rate, growing salmon in huge underwater pens.

But with the growth of salmon farming came controversy.

Top of the list, animal welfare, food safety,

and the effect on the environment.

Farm fishing hasn't always had a great name, has it?

Well it's quite a young industry,

it's only really 40 years old, so like any industry it's gone through

an evolving process so, in the early days it learnt a lot of lessons.

Been some bad press,

and a couple of food scares but it's a completely different

industry now, to what it was, you know, 20, 30 years ago.

Completely different.

I'm coming at this from a shopper's point of view, we're just confused,

we don't know what fish is sustainable and what's not.

We don't know whether to trust farm fishing or not.

What would you say to people then that are still worried about farm fish?

So, if you look at something like the Freedom Food standard,

you don't have to take our word for it, that the

fish are grown to a higher welfare standard, that's an independent

standard, developed by the RSPCA and audited by Freedom Foods.

Independent stamp.

Today, nearly all of the fresh and smoked salmon we eat is farmed.

Wow. It's a floating farm.

Yes, this is a freshwater loch site.

Farmed salmon are grown to order, by carefully managing

their natural life cycle.

Wild salmon start life in fresh water,

before migrating to the sea, and that happens in farmed salmon too.

When they are young, they look nothing like

the silver-skinned fish we see on the shelves.

Looks a bit like a trout, doesn't it? You see the, spots on it.

So, it's a classic kind of freshwater fish, and that fish'll change

into the classic salmon shape and silvery flanks that you and

I would associate with being a, you know, a typical salmon, so to speak.

I'll put this guy back, actually.

In the wild, salmon move to the sea to mature.

It only happens during six weeks in spring, when the days get longer.

On the farms,

they can trick them into thinking it's spring for up to 30 weeks.

This means they can get a steady supply of mature

fish across the year.

-What does the light do?

-We're mimicking nature.

These, have just come out of winter, they're getting 24-hour light

for about a couple of months, they think it's spring, and they

are ready to go to sea at the end of that two-month period under light.

Brilliant.

They think it's getting warmer, they start getting ready,

-preparing themselves for sea.

-They think it's spring.

As they would in the wild, in the spring the wild fish goes down the

river out to sea, it's exactly the same as you would see in wild fish.

-That is nuts.

-Welcome to salmon farming.

That is nuts.

Salmon farmers also use a surprising way to replicate the fish's

epic journey out to sea.

You're moving the fish by lorry.

Absolutely. Best way to do it.

The fish are perfectly happy in those tanks on that truck,

for that hour's journey up to Mallaig to the well boat.

You're, like, hoovering them up through a pipe from the tank,

into there, and then drop 'em in the sea.

Yeah, it's top-quality kit though.

I don't suppose many people realise there are lorry loads of fish

being driven around the Highlands.

Not many, but you and I know.

Ally and his suppliers need to be sure that there is enough

fish being produced to meet demand.

Before they head off to their new saltwater home,

it's time for a fishy roll call.

Fish! Loads of them.

Each and every fish is counted,

and then sent down the flume to the truck.

So you can see the fish coming down in the pipe here.

There's going to be about 25,000 on that truck,

so they've got just over 15,000 just now, so out

of this site, in a year, we'll transfer about three million fish.

That's quite a lot of trucks.

Can I get up on the tuck and have a look?

Sure, let's go.

All year round, trucks full of fish are hurtling round the Highlands.

But you've got to ask yourself, is there really any need for all

these fish to pick up so many road miles?

Forgive me, but why don't you just leave them in the fresh water.

Well, the farming life cycle just mimics the wildlife cycle,

so the fish are ready to go to sea.

Plus, the freshwater environment doesn't have the same

carrying capacity as sea water.

It's very sensitive in balance so it just wouldn't make sense,

to grow the fish to a much larger size

and put more nutrients into the freshwater environment.

The fresh water can't cope with millions of mature salmon.

All the waste from their faeces

and food would damage the ecosystem in this small loch.

Out at sea, the waste is diluted much more.

Although the water quality still has to be closely monitored,

it's a better environment for the salmon to spend their adult life.

I like this.

It's good, isn't it?

Yeah. Let's grill one.

HE CHUCKLES

It'll be some time before I'm let near this lot with my griddle pan.

These salmon will now spend two years in the saltwater farms

out at sea.

And most days, at midnight,

fully-grown salmon are brought back to the mainland.

Tonight is one of the deliveries for Christmas.

-That's an impressive sight

-Yeah.

So the...the smolts that you saw going to sea this morning...

in two years' time they'll be making their journey back

here for harvest, on this boat.

Gregg, this is Hendry, he's the well boat skipper,

he's the man in charge.

This is a very different atmosphere than I expected,

it's really very serious, and very technical.

I feel like I'm on some sort of spaceship or something.

Yeah, there's a lot of technology here.

Hendry McNicol monitors the fish through cameras.

He controls the side arm to move the fish from tanks in the boat.

This slowly encourages the salmon to swim down a pipe at the harbour-side,

that leads into the processing plant.

-How big are those fish right now?

-They're 4.4kg.

From a pink egg, to this big fish - three years?

Yeah.

And it's been watched ever single step of the way.

Yeah, absolutely.

I recognise that one.

He's smiling, look.

Some of the salmon will go direct to the stores to be sold fresh.

Others will be sent to be smoked, the last stage,

before they're ready for us to enjoy.

You hold a packet of smoked salmon in your hand,

at Christmas time and you'd have no idea, no idea.

This is a lot of technology for a slice of smoked salmon.

Yeah.

Most of the salmon consumed in the UK these days

is produced using this sort of technology.

Every Christmas, we buy 2,000 tonnes of smoked salmon in the UK.

That takes nearly a million whole fish to produce.

Wahey!

Here's some of the fish from tonight's harvest.

This is the end of a three- year cycle.

See, you've got a four and a half kilo farmed Scottish salmon.

It's a fantastic fish.

And the important thing is,

these are going to be on the shelf this Christmas.

-Good job.

-Yeah. All down to me.

All down to you.

BOTH LAUGH

Mass farming of fish like this has its critics, but it's turned

a luxury item into a cheaper food that more of us can enjoy.

Nothing bears the brunt of our huge Christmas supermarket shop

more than the trolley.

We love to moan about them, but the modern trolley is

the product of decades of research and some serious engineering -

German engineering.

Seven out of ten British trolleys are built here in Stuttgart,

by global trolley giant, Wanzl, run by Gottfried Wanzl.

This is our assembly hall.

Here is assembled up to 8,000 a day.

Here's a red one, this is Germany, and then you can see over

there Britain, which are just being passed forward.

Over there we have some Tesco trolleys and Lidl, and the green

ones they go for Middle East even, yeah, the green ones over there.

Gottfried's factory makes trolleys for supermarkets

from the Middle East to Iceland, each with their own specific design.

And there is a special place in Gottfried's heart,

for the steel-wired, zinc-plated, British trolley.

These trolleys are typically British.

But typical for the British trolleys is the rounded,

there's a rounded edge, or a rounded corner in front.

If you hit an obstacle you don't crash so much like in a car,

or so, so this is typically British, and to have a main fleet trolley

and to have a little sister, a daily shopper, for the light trolley

as we call it, this couple, I think is also quite unique.

The idea came originally from Britain.

Gottfried is the smiling face of the Wanzl trolley empire,

but his number two, Dr Sattler, takes a tougher approach.

He bashes, tilts and drops trolleys, to check

if they can withstand the punishment we give them back in Blighty.

The tested trolleys get rolled over this 10,000 times.

And he checks the trolley isn't going to tip over too easily.

We want to avoid accidents in the supermarkets.

You can imagine, the child is hanging to one side of the,

of the basket, some terrible accidents can happen.

And there's nothing we hate more, than wonky wheels.

But Dr Sattler is adamant these trolleys are almost indestructible.

Our casters which we are producing here do not fail in this test.

We can pass 1,000 obstacles and nothing will happen at all.

So, there you have it.

The clattering British shopping cart is, in fact, German

and has been tested within a inch of its life.

Earlier, I discovered how that familiar Christmas veg, the sprout,

has been changing into something we might actually want to eat.

But as the big day gets closer,

the simple sprout sets the supermarkets a different challenge.

If we don't find them on the shelves,

we're likely to head for the competition,

so I want to know how they make sure that doesn't happen.

Eight days before Christmas,

I've come back to meet Waitrose sprout guru, Paul Yarrow.

This is it, this must be serious sprout time.

Yeah, eight days out from Christmas,

really working hard to make sure we have all the sprouts on the shelf.

-This is vital for you now then.

-Absolutely.

This is the eight days when we've got a real push,

making sure we've got all the sprouts in store for Christmas.

The pressure is on Paul and his growers,

because sprouts have to be harvested at the last possible minute.

As a former greengrocer, I know that sprouts have a much shorter

shelf life than most other veg,

and it's all to do with the rate they use up their energy.

Well, look we're all aware that some vegetables last longer than others,

but there is a fascinating reason why.

Plants, vegetable plants have energy in them,

and when you cut them they'll only last as long as they'll

burn their energy, so, something little like a Brussels sprout,

or a spear of asparagus, burns its energy really quickly.

It's like a sprinter, it's the Usain Bolt of vegetables.

Where something that burns its energy slower,

like a potato or a carrot, that's more of your, your Mo Farah.

Sorry, Mo. I know you're not a potato, but, you get my point.

Harvesting these little blighters in frosty or wet

conditions can be a nightmare.

But today, they've got a weather window,

so the pickers are going all-out to harvest as much as they can.

It's time for me to take my place on the hopper.

On this machine, large blades cut the sprout trees at their base,

and us pickers feed the trees through a sprout stripper.

The thick stalks end up back in the mud,

and the sprouts end up in the hopper above my head.

I'm steering this, this cutter, with my feet

and I'm working the blade, and then you have to get this

absolutely right, and quick, straight down the hole.

It's a bit like feeding an angry robotic beast.

This is hard work, innit? Physically demanding.

Knowing sprouts burn up their energy quickly,

the next stage is to cool them down and give them a drink.

Oh, ho, ho! What is this?

So, what is here, it's a cold store.

We're trying to keep these sprouts as cool as possible,

and also, get lots of mist in here so, to keep them really moist,

cos what we don't want them to do is dehydrate.

The perfect sprout, rub it together and it should squeak like rubber.

Yeah, you can hear it in your ear.

So, you've got two days here,

then maybe a couple of days on the supermarket shelves.

We're looking at, like, five days, the life of a sprout?

That's our target, yes.

That's not long at all.

With a veg that can decay so quickly,

they need to keep a close eye on the state of every sprout.

From these mist-filled fridges, these squeaky sprouts begin

an assessment process that MI5 would be proud of.

They're my sprouts!

They're sprouts harvested earlier, yes.

That's a special batch of Gregg sprout, that is!

HE LAUGHS

Whoa!

That is one big tub of sprouts.

First the sprouts are graded by size. Then, photographed.

A computer analyses the photo for colour, size and defects.

Every sprout's being turned through the camera.

-That is ridiculous.

-Yeah.

If the sprout doesn't make the grade,

a gas gun blows it off the conveyor.

The rejects go into processed foods.

Hear the hiss, hiss, hiss?

It's knocking the bad sprouts out.

The ones that pass go through a second check

from beady-eyed sprout monitors.

Finally, they get their bottoms chopped off,

their outer leaves removed and they're ready to be packed.

I absolutely love that. They are trimmed perfectly, look.

Then it's one last rush to get them into refrigeration trucks,

and onto the shelves in time for Christmas.

Here they are. The most complicated vegetables on the shelves -

Brussels sprouts.

So, the next time you get them on your plate, give them a go.

Shelf life is a major issue for the supermarkets,

especially at Christmas.

Their research shows we prefer to buy enough food to cover

the whole holiday period.

So, they try to come up with products that will stay fresh

throughout the festivities.

And they've found ways to give a longer life,

to some surprising items.

I love cake.

What does... "I love the cake."

Moira Silenti is a technologist for Tesco.

She travels the UK testing and tasting hundreds of desserts.

Today we're off to Cornwall,

where she is assessing one very unusual Christmas creation.

So, we're going to a factory today to look at a chocolate wreath

that we've been working on since January.

-What's it called, a chocolate reef?

-Yep.

-Reef.

Wreath, yeah like you put on the door at Christmas.

-A wreath.

-Yeah.

-Is that what it looks like?

-Yeah.

-Hang on.

Doesn't a chocolate cake sort of melt within a day or two, or go off?

It won't go off and it won't melt, cos we're putting in the fridge,

and also we've developed it so that it's got a long shelf life.

-How long?

-So it's got 26 days' life.

It lasts for nearly a month?

Yeah, yeah, it does. It's brilliant. You are going to love it.

HE CHUCKLES

How on earth do you make a chocolate dessert that lasts 26 days?

Behind this unremarkable exterior are wizards of the baking world.

Kensey Foods make all manner of desserts for Tesco.

And from their development kitchen they are constantly offering

up ideas for new ones.

Now, when we bake at home,

we're mainly thinking about what it'll taste like.

If you're baking for the supermarkets there's an extra

checklist as long as my arm.

First up, how will customers get it home?

You know what? That is as light as a feather, it's so delicate,

I would love to be able to buy one of these and take it home.

That's pie in the sky, cos you can't put that in your shopping trolley.

Second, will it sell at the right time of year?

Are they drinks, or are they desserts?

They're cocktails, so they're cocktail desserts.

For me, these feel quite summery, so I can see myself on the beach,

eating this.

And, will it last long enough on the shelves, and in your fridge?

I mean, that is, that is lovely, but that's not going to last is it,

how long would that last on the shelf?

Maybe three, four days tops.

So, yeah, so anything with fresh fruit is

a no-no as far as shelf life's concerned.

When Moira wanted a posh Christmas dessert with a long shelf life,

what did they come up with?

This is it, is it? This is it.

-Yep, this is our Christmas product.

-What is it exactly?

It's all-butter biscuit base, with chocolate ganache,

nuts and dried berries, mixed with the ganache

and topped with more dried fruits and nuts.

A typical chilled dessert lasts five to ten days.

This one is designed to last 26.

The trick is controlling the water.

Bacteria that cause food decay need water to grow.

What the bakers have chosen for this cake,

is either very dry ingredients...

-Nuts good?

-Yep, absolute great.

Dried fruit?

Or, ingredients where the water is bound together with sugar,

which means bacteria can't get to it.

-So, chocolate, obviously, big shelf life.

-Yep.

-Crystallised, sugared fruit.

-Yes.

-I'd like to see it being made if that's all right.

-Yeah, let me take you now, into the bakery.

-Wahey!

The factory is about to start full production of the wreath,

but before they do, Moira has to be sure that what's being made

here is exactly to her specification.

So, we're coming in to see the chocolate wreath being manufactured.

First of all we have to take our outdoor shoes off and put them

into the racking.

If you're making a factory dessert, it's not just bacteria

from the ingredients you need to keep out, it's from humans as well.

Blue mesh hairnet on.

I know you've not got a lot to cover up but, for consistency.

Not funny, right. Not funny at all.

Over the top.

Well, that's doubly safe, innit?

Yep and then, twist our legs over and then we just need to put,

your wellies.

Put your hands in here.

So we just need to go and repeat the process here, Gregg.

Got to wash our hands again!

We must have gone, five steps, and we've got to wash our hands again.

So here we put our hands through, and this time it's hand sanitizer.

So sanitising your hands so...

She's having a laugh.

-So this is our boot wash.

-Right.

Way-hey-hey! Lovely!

Now that I've been scrubbed, washed and sanitized,

we're finally ready to see the production line.

The Christmas Wreath order is small by supermarket standards,

just 10,000 cakes, and each one is finished by hand.

But there is no space for a bit of cook's judgment here.

Moira needs every wreath to be exactly the same.

We've put chocolate, cherries and berries, flaked almonds

and nibbed pecans.

Is this to make the base?

To make the base. Make the ring.

I want to know how you go from a bowl of that,

into a base, a round base.

-Would you let me show you?

-Yeah.

-Could I show you?

-Yeah.

-Right. Thank you.

-Don't hang about.

All the ingredients are strictly measured.

That's half a kilo of chocolate.

-It is.

-First I make the biscuit base,

then we add the dried fruit and nut ring.

He's our lovely chocolate wreath that we're going to glaze.

Look at that, look.

Once it's glazed, it's ready to send down the production line.

You've got a conveyor belt though, one's doing the

-oranges, one's doing some more dried fruit, one's doing the nuts, one's doing the cherries.

-Yeah.

How many nuts have I got to put in each section?

Five in each section.

You're mad, there's not room put five in.

-That will lift the colour.

-Stop crouching me.

Once I've put on 30 nuts, 15 cherries, three bits of orange

and 12 apricots, it's time for a bit more glaze.

Wahey!

'Some choccie tubes...'

-One of me nuts has fallen off.

-That's OK.

'And I'm done.'

So, we've made our cakes, now what?

Yep, so we're going to take them into the kitchen and check

whether they're good enough to go on the Tesco shelves.

Moira needs to check that what's coming off the production line,

matches her strict specification.

Do you do this every single time you launch a new cake?

-Yeah, pretty much yeah.

-Every cake.

-Every cake?

-Yep.

-Every cake.

These three count every single nut, cherry and choccie tube.

-This cake...

-You've got the three orange slices, but no cherries.

That cake gets a red light.

So, to me, this has got five, for the chocolate scrolls evenly placed.

Would you agree this cake gets the green light?

-Yes.

-Good to go.

-Great.

Excellent.

The next crucial test.

Will this dessert last on the shelf for 26 days?

Moira is using a bit of kit that tests something called

"water activity".

A measure of the water that's available for bacteria to grow in.

So, I've taken some of the base, placed it into the container,

put the lid on.

We press start on the machine.

Supermarkets set their own standards for shelf life.

Moira needs a reading of below 0.85

to give the wreath a life of 26 days.

You've got your result.

Yeah, so the machine's finished reading

and the water activity there is 0.7112

so that's well below the 0.85 that we need.

HE EXHALES Yep, definitely.

-We're fine.

-Good to go.

We're fine. We're fine, we're fine. All right, well done.

Well done, crying out loud, a lot goes into a cake.

I just normally bake one at home.

I don't put a silly hairnet on, I don't plug it into a computer.

This dessert has already been through months of taste testing

and customer taste panels.

But Moira wants to check it one final time.

So it's my chance to try some.

That is a decent, well-made cake.

I like the crunch, I like the chocolate.

That is rich and it's heavy. And I've got a sweet tooth.

I like that, but you wouldn't want a great deal of it.

So, would you buy it?

Would I buy it?

I don't think so.

Because I can bake, and bake well.

ALL CHUCKLE

I mean I'm impressed that you can get a cake that tastes like that,

that can last 26 days, that does impress me, it really does.

And I'd happily eat it if somebody gave me a slice.

Happily eat it.

Well, I've eaten my fair share of desserts in my time,

and, to be fair, I've made better ones than that at home,

but I don't think that's the point.

What that is, is a triumph of science and food engineering,

because there is a decent flavoured chocolate cake that can

last on the shelf for almost a month.

I've travelled across Britain to see how all our festive

food has been made and moved.

Everything from salmon to sprouts...

desserts to drinks...

and I've saved the centrepiece of our Christmas dinner to last.

My final stop is back at Sainsbury's depot Waltham Point,

where my journey started.

It's time for me to muck in on one of the last shifts before Christmas.

OK, gentlemen, now you've had your brief,

it's going to be a really busy day today.

It's the weekend before Christmas and these guys are getting

ready to put all our Christmas food onto trucks to head to the stores.

They've put me with the tough guys of the depot,

I'm on the turkey team.

And we know we've got a busy day, so let's get on with it.

Do any of you work on chilled, do you know where I go with the turkeys?

Yeah, turkeys...over there.

Morning, gents.

Let's get these cases onto the shelves,

and ultimately onto the customers' tables.

We spend 55 million quid on turkeys at Christmas.

It's the most important festive product.

Lovely. OK.

But the big birds present a challenge to depots like this.

While the rest of our shopping whizzes round on conveyor belts,

turkeys are too bulky,

and they've got to be done the old-fashioned way.

It's a long time since I've handled one of these.

It's just like riding a bike.

This is what we used

when I started out as a greengrocer nearly 30 years ago.

It's nice to see that despite all the belts and lasers,

there are still guys lifting boxes to order.

These turkeys have just come in from suppliers,

and we've got to get them sorted to go to stores across London.

How many, Baz?

You need one.

New group. Yeah, one in there

-I'm good at this, ain't I?

-Come on, keep up.

Dulwich. Not far from where I come from.

Running a bit behind, we need to step it up now.

-Chiswick.

-Five to Chiswick

Five!

Chiswick's just showing off.

After a couple of hours' work, I've shifted a few hundred turkeys -

a tiny contribution to our nation's Christmas dinner.

Across the country, depots at Christmas are sorting out

millions of turkeys for us, along with thousands of other products.

-I work like lightning, mate, you're better off just standing.

-I want to go home today.

You'll get the hang of this, Barry, won't you, you'll pick this up, I reckon.

Yeah, not as quick as you though, you know.

Well, no, you're not going to be as quick as me but I reckon you'll pick it up.

-When do we get a tea break?

-Tea break...?

It's easy for me to get nostalgic about the old way of doing

things, but these huge computerised warehouses

are the modern world of supermarkets, a world that

can handle food on a vast scale and bring us our Christmas.

Delivering food to the shelves is complicated at any time of year,

but at Christmas time the supermarkets are at full throttle.

It's then when the stakes are highest

and they're the most under pressure.

For me, it's been fascinating, looking at the planning,

the logistics and the level of detail that goes into it all.