Sugar Rush Food Factory

Most of us love sugar, but we don't make our own at home.

There's plenty of it in these but what do you have to do to get it out?

To find out, we're going to make our own from scratch.

We think we know what sugar is, but how much do we really know about it?

Now, any guesses as to what this mysterious vegetable might be?

It's a bit like a giant parsnip.

-Any ideas?

-No.

No, but if it's slimming let me know about it.

LAUGHTER

-It might be a sugar beet.

-Give me five!

It's a sugar beet.

-How do you get the sugar out of that?

-You squash it up somehow.

A chopping process with knives or something.

-Quite aggressive, your technique, isn't it?

-Yeah, very aggressive.

When I was a kid, I used to get into masses of trouble

for playing with my food, but now it's what I like doing most.

I love finding out what happens to the stuff that we eat.

But finding out what factories do to our food isn't easy

so to copy the big boys, I've set up my own food factory here in this barn.

To help me discover what the masters of mass production do,

I'm going to need some factory workers.

Clocking on for today's shift are the stars of TV food show, Something For The Weekend.

Chef Simon Rimmer

and host Tim Lovejoy.

But whose version of today's supermarket food

will go in the basket, and whose will go in the bin?

Our shift at the Food Factory is about to begin.

Tim, Simon, brilliant to have you here today.

What I want to know, Tim, is are you any good in the kitchen?

-I'm getting quite good at chopping.

-It's a start!

Kind of like all the chopping, destroying, rebuilding stuff.

-Yeah, I don't like baking.

-No.

Well look, the thing we'll be making is something that crops up in pretty much every kitchen in the land

because we're going to be making...

..this.

Grab a spoon each and have a little taste of that.

Ah, it's salt!

No, it's not, it's sugar.

We sort of take it for granted and the big question is how do you make the stuff?

Something tells me that isn't easy.

Gentlemen, the barn awaits.

Simon is absolutely right.

The experts say we won't be able to make our own sugar,

but I'm not telling them that.

Your task is to make two rival bags of sugar.

First you need to work out how you get sugar in the first place.

-What does it come from? Any guesses?

-Beet or cane, I'd go for.

Top of the class, aren't you? Here we have it. It's quite weird stuff.

-Wow.

-That is a beautiful bundle of Ugandan sugar cane.

It comes from hot places, not really from Britain.

The other source are these. These are sugar beets.

This is British, it's from Cambridgeshire.

-Shall we have a little taste?

-Yes.

-OK, the sugarcane first.

Have a little crunch on that.

-That's lovely, isn't it?

-That's delicious.

-Quite a lot of sugar in that.

-Mm.

-And the second one, the sugar beet.

Have a little taste.

It's OK, it tastes earthy, but that's because it's been in the earth.

But still very sweet, isn't it?

You're going to make two rival bags of sugar

using the same techniques as they use in a food factory,

and then we're going to take your bags of sugar and offer them to some very discerning taste testers,

who will decide which one is most like the stuff from the supermarket.

-Meet your ingredients. Tim, those are your beets.

-OK.

Simon, there is your Ugandan sugar cane.

-Are you ready for some hard work, guys?

-BOTH: Yep.

-OK, get to work.

-Come on.

-Come on, Tim.

Getting any sugar out of these two won't be easy.

That's why my ever-so-clever factory foremen Marty and Todd are here to help.

Hello, Simon.

Ah, Marty, well my basic memory of chemistry at school

is that somehow or other we need to make a solution that we then turn into granules.

Is that about right?

Yes, that's right, and the first thing we've got to do is get the juice out of this,

which is what the sugar's contained in.

Half the sugar we eat comes from cane grown in the tropics.

The other half comes from sugar beet grown here in the UK.

-We've got to make sugar out of that. It looks a bit like a parsnip.

-It's not great, is it?

What we'll do is we'll absolutely shred it, then boil it up

and that will get the sugar out of it, into the liquid.

They're really throwing themselves into it,

but the one thing that neither Simon nor Tim knows is that this isn't just a bit of cooking -

This is really difficult!

-OK, that's good.

-This is man's work!

Both these crops must be broken up to make a sugary juice.

They're tough stuff so coming up with some contraptions won't be easy.

Tim, tell me what you've got here.

Well, we've taken some graters, we've made our drum here to grate it.

An electric drill is going to power it. We're going to grate all this down,

and then we're going to extract our sugar out of that.

-That easy?

-It's that easy.

-That was SAID very simply.

-That is how they do it.

Although these crops look very different, they both contain the same stuff.

Pure sugar. So, why do sugar beet and sugarcane have so much sugar in them?

It's there as an energy source that the plants use to grow.

They are quite unusual these two,

because most vegetables store their energy as starch.

We get a huge energy boost when we eat sugar as well,

and to show you that I'm going to pump some icing sugar towards a naked flame. See what happens.

Sugar is high in calories.

Calories are a measure of how much energy is released when our bodies burn food.

Let's see just how much energy a teaspoon of sugar gives us

by burning all that energy up at once.

There's a huge amount of energy stored up in these little granules.

Simon and Tim will need plenty of energy now to get at their sugar.

Simon is feeding his cane into a mangle to squeeze the sugary juice out.

Are you ready, guys? OK, start the production line.

Come on, give it some.

-Yes!

-Look at that.

-There's a kind of creamy liquid coming out.

-That's amazing.

Tim and Todd must do two jobs to get juice from their beet.

They've got to grate it up and then boil it in water. What have you got?

It's worked well, hasn't it? It's nice, isn't it? It tastes nice.

I think you've got to make quite a lot of that, don't you?

-Crack on. I'll see you later.

-OK.

The secret to making sugar is to make the juice sweeter at every stage

by getting rid of everything else.

So, who's juice is sweetest so far?

I'm confident. I'm confident.

Now, gentlemen, bring in your sugary liquids.

In the food factory, they need to do this scientifically. It's not just a question of tasting something

so they have one of these things.

It has a very complicated name, but it is just a sweetometer basically.

Let's get one mil.

All right? OK.

OK, Simon, you are 16.1% sugar. Are you feeling confident, Tim?

-No.

-Good, good.

Wouldn't it be great though if mine did win?

Do you know what, it would be quite exciting because it looks rubbish.

I mean, er, it looks like it's at an early stage.

Tim, come and have a look. 7.7. You've got a long way to go.

What you need to do now is drive out all the rest of the water.

Get it up as close to 100% purity as you can.

How much are we trying to make? A bag or a teaspoon?

A bag would be nice.

-Can you take your buckets and your saucepans and get refining.

-On it.

There's a long way to go.

The sugar is inside their juice but it will only be revealed

after they work out how to get rid of all the other stuff in their buckets.

While Simon and Tim continue their quest,

I'm off to discover why it's claimed high-tech energy drinks

give us an even bigger boost than sugar does.

What do you think is the most important ingredient in the energy drink?

We've got glucuronolactone, taurine, inositol, caffeine, and sugar.

Yeah, I think taurine and caffeine are the most important.

I know that taurine does something to the metabolism.

-More than likely it's the sugar.

-Does it change the way you act?

-I speed up.

-Speed up, run about a bit more?

-Yes.

Energy drinks, they're big business, but do they work?

And if they do,

what are the ingredients which really deliver the extra energy?

To find out, I'm going to make my own.

First a quick test to measure my energy levels.

OK, so this machine is going to measure how long it takes me to go 400 metres.

It's a few hours since lunch and my energy is flagging.

So how will I perform?

Nearly there!

Blimey! 44 seconds.

I need a drink.

I've got just the stuff standing by.

These are the ingredients of an energy drink laid bare.

It's a cocktail of flavourings, natural extracts,

and a shed load of sugar.

Sugar equals calories and calories give us energy

so that should help power me up.

Gosh, that's really sweet.

But sugar is not the only ingredient.

There's loads of other stuff too.

Here's something for that distinctive but strange flavour.

Pine oil.

It's a weird thing to be putting in a drink, isn't it?

Smells like floor cleaner.

I just need a single drop.

Energy drink makers seem to like using flavours which taste like cough medicine.

I guess that's maybe what you want,

something that tastes like it's doing you good in some way.

Next, the strangely-named ingredients

which we assume must deliver the extra kick.

With their unfamiliar names, they sound impressive,

but the chemical which really delivers the hit has a name we all know.

Something that's been scientifically proven to increase alertness,

keep sleep at bay, and raise flagging energy levels. Caffeine.

Energy drinks contain more caffeine than cola,

but less than filter coffee.

But here's the real secret.

When it's combined with sugar, caffeine gives us an even bigger boost.

Finally, a squirt of colour and my concentrate is complete.

All I need now is the fizz.

Energy drinks don't have to be gassy, but that's what we like.

I've got to add my concentrate to fizzy water.

The extinguisher contains carbon dioxide gas.

This one has been specially adapted so no copying now.

When I press the handle down, the carbon dioxide comes up,

down the tube, and into the bottle.

Just in case it goes bang.

OK, here goes.

Now all I've got to do is pour in my concentrate and hey presto,

my own energy drink.

What does that look like?

# Oui oui oui, oui oui oui oui... #

I know what you're thinking. It looks like an energy drink.

Hmm, I wonder what it tastes like.

# Oui oui oui, oui oui oui oui... #

Blimey, it is like those energy drinks.

They sort of...I think people say it tastes like it's good for you,

which is another way of saying it tastes really weird.

But will it improve my athletic prowess?

TIGER ROARS

HE BURPS

Give it half an hour to take effect, and I'm ready to test

whether this super sugary caffeine cocktail can really boost my performance.

44 seconds is the time to beat. Here goes.

Three, two, one.

The caffeine should give me an adrenaline surge

and the sugar, some extra energy to really raise my game.

I've hit the wall. Come on!

40! Four seconds faster!

Brilliant, it works.

So, not lab conditions, but drinks industry tests like this

show energy drinks boost performance by about 20%.

They don't say why but it is scientifically proven

that when caffeine is combined with sugar, we get an extra boost.

# Oui oui oui, oui oui oui. #

My very own energy drink. And it works.

But only our taste testers can decide whether mine tastes as good as the shop bought stuff.

A little splash each.

No, I don't like that.

I could do with some energy, but, no.

No. I like energy drinks, but not that, no.

-It's OK.

-Is it the sort of thing you might expect to find in a shop?

-Yeah, definitely.

-I'm nearly there!

Would you buy that from a shop?

I wouldn't buy it.

That's me told! Thank you very much.

Back in the barn, Simon Rimmer

and Tim Lovejoy are trying to produce two rival bags

of granulated white sugar. It's the toughest challenge

ever issued in the barn.

Simon must work out how to get the sugar out of sugarcane,

while Tim's got to get sugar from sugar beet.

The whole task

starts by making sugary juice.

Now, Tim's got to strain off the waste beet

before he's ready for Stage Two.

-Is it working?

-It is actually... except that bit you've splattered in there. Yeah.

Tim and Simon will only end up with sugar

if they can remove all the impurities in their juice.

The next stage is very tricky.

To get all the impurities out of this sugar liquid,

the Food Factory is using a very clever bit of chemistry.

What I've got here is calcium hydroxide.

It's also known as lime, but it's lime that's a mineral,

not the stuff that you squeeze into your gin and tonic.

In here, I've got some water

with some of the lime dissolved in it.

So, what the food factories do is they bubble carbon dioxide

through the liquid, which sounds a bit tricky,

but I should have just enough carbon dioxide

in my own breath to make this work. Here goes.

Something very clever happens when the carbon dioxide gas

meets the calcium hydroxide.

They form chalk.

The chalk is brilliant because all the impurities in the sugar liquid

will bind to it and that makes it much easier to filter them out.

To copy the factory trick,

now Tim and Simon must add lime and carbon dioxide

to their sugary juice.

-Is it supposed to go yellow?

-You know what?

I don't know.

Simon and Tim can't blow bubbles into their juice,

it's a food factory,

so, they're using canisters of carbon dioxide.

Very gently squeeze the trigger. That's good.

As the chalk forms, it grabs hold of all the impurities

and drags them down into a sludgy deposit.

Now they need to filter off the sugary juice.

-Now we need to filter it to get rid of the impurities the chalk is holding onto?

-That's right.

Now they should be left with a very sweet sugary juice.

All they've got to do is get rid of the water.

That doesn't look quite right to me!

-Does that mean we're going to struggle to get this white?

-(I don't think it's going to be white.)

(I don't think so either!)

Tim and Todd's effort looks much more promising.

That is working!

-It really looks like it!

-It's working!

-Don't get too excited yet!

-Come on! No, it's working, I'm excited.

But how does it taste?

Ours tastes caramely.

-Does it?

-It's still slightly earthy.

It's still got that sort of carrot/parsnip quality to it.

But after all that clever chemistry,

is their juice closer to sugar

or sludge?

It's time for quality control.

-Oh, my word! These are wildly different, aren't they?

-Very, very.

Look how clear and pure that is,

even though it tastes a bit root vegetabley.

It's nice, it's caramely.

Taste, Mr Lovejoy.

It's the sweetest gravy you'll ever taste.

What you have managed to do, is take this beautiful tasting thing

and make it taste not as nice!

Now, we need to get rid of all the water.

Leave behind nice gleaming white granules at the end.

Now, you're going to do that by heating the stuff up,

but this is where it gets difficult. If you heat it too fast,

it'll turn into toffee and if you heat it too slowly, you won't get it dry enough.

Boiling off the water is critical. If they get it wrong,

they'll ruin a whole day's work and they'll have nothing

for our taste testers.

So, will Tim and Simon's sugar quest end in triumph

or treacle?

If Simon and Tim think they've got it tough,

they should see what happens inside the factory I'm off to visit.

This one has 20,000 workers and on every shift,

they carry half their own bodyweight for miles at a time.

Without them, we'd never eat honey.

The factory I am going to is a hive of activity and inside,

is the key to making honey that's runny

or honey that's set hard.

Bees do all the hard work.

Collecting pollen and nectar from flowers.

They can get quite cross if they're bothered by outsiders,

so I need a bit of protection.

Jed Marshall is the bees' boss and he's going to let me see inside.

Oh, my God! It is quite scary.

The hive's packed with bees,

all busily turning nectar from plants into honey.

We're about to look in and see how they're doing.

Honey is food for the bees,

so Jed can only take what's spare,

but he's got a cunning plan.

They've started filling this box up quite well with honey,

so we're going to put another box on top.

Every time Jed adds a new layer, these bees will fill it with honey.

Hang on! You're basically tricking them into making more honey?

We're making their life easier, so they can be more productive.

Yeah right! That's what you say!

Most factories do not allow any tasting on the factory floor,

I wonder if these guys will mind?

Seems like a really, really silly thing to do!

Oh, wow.

So that is really runny.

So this presumably goes to make runny honey that we buy in the jars?

Not necessarily, all honey starts off runny

and it depends on what flowers they're fed on as to

whether it's going to be set honey or clear honey, runny honey.

So whether your honey is runny or set hard

all depends on the types of flowers the bees have been visiting.

So how do honey producers know which type of bee's honey

to put in the jars so we can buy it runny or set?

That's the job of the blender.

David Bondi is the boss at Rowse,

one of Britain's biggest honey producers.

So this is the British honey mountain right here?

It's fantastic, isn't it?

We have hundreds of drums of honey

that come from lots of different plants

from lots of different countries round the world.

Let's start over here, this is a clover honey from Canada.

It's actually very mild, isn't it?

This is acacia honey from Hungary.

Wow!

It's so runny!

So what I want to know is this.

These are the same thing, they're both honey,

they're made by bees from flowers. They're just from different plants.

How can different plants make two honeys

that are so totally different?

That's all hard and this one's all runny.

The nectars that these are made from are different.

They contain different natural sugars.

There are two types of sugar in honey, glucose and fructose.

Whether it's set or runny depends on how much of each.

So this honey has lots of glucose in it. And glucose will crystallise.

This honey has lots of fructose, fructose does not crystallise.

All David has to do is get the balance of glucose

and fructose just right to make honey that's runny or set.

Then it's ready for the shops.

Back in the barn, food show regulars Simon Rimmer and Tim Lovejoy

are attempting to make a supermarket food we never ever make at home.

They're making sugar from scratch.

That's amazing.

Simon's working with cane from the tropics.

Tim's hoping to get his from sugar beet grown in the UK.

First they processed their crops into sugary juice,

and filtered out the impurities.

But now they've reached the trickiest stage.

They've got to heat up their juice to get rid of all the water,

leaving behind just the sugar.

All I can see in here at the moment is bubbles.

At this stage, the sugar is still hiding in their sugary liquids.

And the secret to getting hold of the crystals is

getting rid of all the water.

If they can get rid of the water then all they'll have left is sugar.

That's the theory anyway.

-It's not really...

-It's not getting hot enough, is it?

As the water boils away,

they're left with a super-concentrated sugar juice.

Now the factory uses a special trick

to encourage the sugar crystals to form.

Take a look at this. It looks like a clear liquid

but it's actually jam-packed with crystals, bursting to get out.

All I need to do is add a few crystals to start it off.

Look at this down at the bottom.

It's like a coral reef rising from the bottom of the jar.

Simon and Tim must copy this factory trick.

This solution contains millions of tiny sugar crystals.

You can actually feel it you can feel the resistance in it now.

These tiny seeding crystals give the sugar in the juice

something to latch onto.

Now crystals of sugar should start to grow.

As you stir it you can almost feel

as if there's sugar in that solution.

Oh, yes, Marty. I can feel it!

I really can't believe this is going to end up white.

I've given up with it being white ages ago.

The sugar will only crystallise

if they successfully removed all the impurities earlier on.

OK, so I think this is getting close.

Tim and Tod need to get rid of the last of the water in their juice.

This is no time to be doing the laundry, boys.

In fact, machines just like a spin dryer and a tumble dryer

are used at the factory to spin off the water and dry the sugar.

So has it worked?

No.

Yeah, it's drawn all the moisture on to one side.

Not very exciting though, is it?

TIM LAUGHS

What did you want? For me to get out a rabbit.

Or a dove! Fly!

It is a bit like conjuring, Tim, get rid of all the water

and the sugar has no where left to hide, it will crystallise!

After all the work we've put in.

No doubt that is sugar. I mean, it's fantastic, I mean, absolutely.

We've done it.

Well, nearly there.

-We've got to get this dry because we're not there yet.

-Tumble dryer?

Success with the sugar beet. How about Simon's sugar cane?

Every time that we've reduced this down, the molasses has got more

and more gloopy and gooey and it's just won't shift, will it?

But you can feel, you can see it,

you can see we've got crystals in there.

The treacly molasses are hard to wash off the sugar.

It's too late now for Simon to get his sugar out.

Tim senses victory will be sweet.

This is the moment we put it in the dryer.

It's going to be beautiful, Tim, you know it's going to be beautiful.

-Now the moment of...

-Now the moment.

To reveal...

That is fantastic. Look, sugar, sugar.

That is good.

It's the moment of truth.

Simon, Tim, please stop your production lines now.

Can you package up your sugar

and bring them over to me for some quality control.

Let's see what you've got. You've got smiles. That's for sure!

-Can I have a little look?

-Of course.

Ooh, that looks good!

My white granulated sugar is in there. It's just not come out.

In another form?

You just can't see it.

-You never know, it might taste fantastic.

-Yeah.

-I'll have a try.

THEY LAUGH

Ah, that's like everything that's bad in the world in one small pot.

So over here we have...

No!

Hello. What's that? That's sugar!

-Oh, my word. I am...

-Sugar granules!

..Seriously impressed. Let's have a little taste of it though.

It's very sweet. There's a bit of fudginess to it.

But it's not for me to decide.

We've got a lot of very hungry taste testers outside

who are going to put both of these onto their strawberries

to judge whether or not it's anything like the shop-bought thing.

Grab your trays. Let's go.

CROWD APPLAUD

Please dig in.

Slightly bitter aftertaste.

That's not...

It's not good, is it?

The strawberries are actually better without it.

THEY LAUGH

So this is my sugar.

ALL: Oooh!

What about that? What do you think?

-It's quite nice.

-It's a bit like soft brown sugar.

I'm like Paul Daniels, I turn that into that!

Amazing!

Come on.

OK, guys, in you come.

OK, so I want a show of hands if you think that Simon's version

of sugar was the closest one to the stuff that you buy in the shops.

Where did that come from?

Who thinks that Tim's version was the closest

-to the stuff you buy in the shops? Raise your hands.

-Oh, thank you.

I'm not even going to bother counting.

Well, Simon, your version of sugar is going to go in the bin.

I'm terribly sorry.

-Tim, yours is going in the shopping basket.

-Yay!

You've both been absolutely fantastic.

Please give them a round of applause.

CROWD APPLAUD

The experts said we wouldn't be able to make sugar in the barn,

so Tim's success was a brilliant surprise,

and Simon shouldn't feel too bad.

Now, sugar gives us a real energy boost, and it grows easily,

but as we've discovered, it's not quite so simple to process!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd