Authors: Joanna Blythman
Most cooks, even hardened professional chefs and caterers with experience of institutions such as prisons and hospitals, would find this environment unfamiliar and baulk at working there for a day, let alone for a lifetime. Many of the individual industrially proportioned units of equipment would fill a generous-sized sitting room. Grouped together, they could easily occupy the ground space of a football pitch and the height of a motorway petrol station forecourt.
These factories are laid out in one seamless, highly efficient assembly-line process, designed according to a flow diagram to create the sequence of steps and tasks in the manufacturing process. Depending on the company’s product lines, equipment can include spiral chillers, dehumidifiers, injectors, extruders, steam-jacketed kettles, centrifugal screeners, swept surface coolers, hoppers, sifters, oil conditioners, Stephan mixers, colloid mills, steam infusion and plate exchanger cookers, batch fryers, spray dryers, horizontal conveyor dryers, flash-cooling pumps, oven bands, freezer belts, horizontal agitators, batch and continuous lines, make-up lines, continuous mixers, high shear mixers, evaporators, and a whole apparatus of other kit that bears absolutely no resemblance to any home cook’s appliances and batterie de cuisine.
The equivalent here of a domestic saucepan is a steaming vat that would require a window cleaner’s ladder to look into, one with dimensions large enough to swallow up several Mafia informers at a time. Equipment clunks, spurts, grinds, squeezes, divides, stacks, minces, bakes, sucks, checks, injects, detects, chills, blasts, shapes, ploughs, agitates, steams, dries, forms, codes, freezes, defrosts, microwaves, churns, paddles, calibrates, signals, bleeps, hums, rolls, vibrates, and cools. Sauces are cooked by the ton then spewed out onto other food components that are cooked on a conveyor belt. One ready meals company is proud to say that its factory manufactures ten tons of chicken tikka a day.
The noise produced by these gargantuan pieces of plant is deafening. There’s no way that you’ll be humming along to Radio 2, or chatting with colleagues on the production line to help make the shift go by faster. There’s no possibility of any camaraderie here. Instead, if you’ve any sense, you’ll do what you can to protect your hearing and wear your company-provided ear plugs, then retreat for hours at a time into your own isolated, private world of thoughts, dreaming perhaps of being promoted to a better post, or finding another job doing something else entirely, until it’s time for a break.
And you will need to become accustomed to working in extreme temperatures. Apart from the warmer slaughterhouse and cooking stages, the ambient temperature in most zones of food factories is bitingly raw and cold, conditions that chill you down to the bone marrow. Anyone who works here will have to show endurance and stamina, and hopefully be in possession of a very robust immune system. If you tend to get a cold whenever you get chilled, you won’t last long. You will also need to get accustomed to the smells. The faintly bloody smell you might find in a traditional high street butcher is one thing, but that fleshy odour, scaled up and intensified on an amplified scale because of the high throughput of carcasses, is another. If you work in a factory specialising in crisps, fried breaded and battered foods, chips, or ‘hand-held’ snacks such as crisps and corn chips, you will come out smelling like the products you make; the fatty whiff hangs in your hair. The most off-putting smell that assailed me was in a ready meals factory, where the atmosphere was filled with the sweet, cloying scent of gloopy, viscous tomato sauce and starchy, sticky béchamel with a fragrance reminiscent of regurgitated baby milk. Maybe people who work there stop noticing it after a while. I hope so. Working in food processing facilities is hard graft in so many ways, so it is hardly surprising that a high staff turnover and high rates of sickness absence are par for the course, or that many major plants are consistently understaffed and rely on agencies to fill the gaps. The use of temporary agency labour is commonplace throughout the food industry, particularly to cover peaks in demand: the run-up to Christmas, for instance.
The less experienced jobs in food processing are so unremittingly monotonous, repetitive and unrewarding that they must surely depress the spirits and elevate stress levels. Who wants to spend 12 hours a day arranging meatballs as though they were boxes of chocolates, or checking that there are four cubes of meat in every portion of chicken casserole, according to the product specification? But some food processing jobs are highly skilled. Although most people would consider it the most grizzly, hellish job in the world, the slaughterhouse men who take a dead whole carcass and ‘dissemble’ it – that’s breaking it down into its main parts, stripping back the skin and hide, vacuuming out spinal cord, splicing heads in two, removing tendons and hoofs, brains, pancreas, kidneys, suet, collecting ears and thymus, emptying colons, examining lymph nodes, separating guts, cutting out the major bones, pulling off membranes, de-gristling and segregating everything that hasn’t a food or other use to produce fore- and hind-quarters for further butchery – are consummate experts.
Those whom I have seen working on the carcass ‘dissembly’ line move at a fierce pace: a state-of-the-art abattoir can break down a whole cow into quarters and bag them, in 40 minutes. There, staff typically operate non-stop for three and a half hours at a time in a hot, steamy, visceral atmosphere, demonstrating a certainty and adroitness that comes from experience. In food processing terms, they are well paid, because they have to concentrate intently, each and every second, on what they are doing.
Their task requires training, physical strength, endurance, precision knife skills, excellent hand-to-eye coordination, and a developed understanding of anatomy. Their brains need to be engaged every second. A slip of the knife, a moment’s lapse of attention, and a gory catalogue of accidents is waiting to happen. The jobs of these slaughtermen are repetitive, but they aren’t dull or unintelligent any more than that of the craft jeweller or clockmaker, who peers into the innards of watches all day, making minute adjustments and repairs.
For their part, the food-factory boss men, who have nice, bright, clean offices with lots of windows, upstairs, or in another building, talk not of ‘food’, but of ‘product’. The word ‘cooking’ doesn’t come into it; they use the more honest term: ‘manufacture’. Industry top brass refers not to ingredients, but ‘food ingredient technology’ and ‘food ingredients systems’. Their vocabulary speaks volumes about how companies view the job in hand.
Food processing executives have a long list of daily hygiene and food safety concerns, because danger is omnipresent in the industrial food system. Metal detection, for instance, requires an entire strategy, part of the ongoing military campaign to prevent any uninvited foreign object from getting into your microwaveable meal, sandwich or prepared salad. With so many complex, intricate pieces of industrial equipment in use, there is always a very real possibility that a screw, nut or some other piece of equipment drops into your macaroni cheese. Allergens are another constant bugbear. A trace of soya or peanut where it ought not to be, and a whole day’s production is scuppered.
Given the high risk inherent in industrial-scale food manufacture, record-keeping is critical. Every piece of equipment and ingredient must come with a paper trail to vouch for its origins and safety. The managers below the boss men have internal audits – essentially box-ticking exercises – coming out of their ears. They supervise elaborate coding schemes to ensure that each and every product that goes through the production process is traceable back to a specific batch, grade and type, made at a specific time of day. That’s no mean effort: a ready meals factory can be churning out 250,000 individual servings a day, made up of 60 or 70 different products, using ten different assembly lines. One leading ready meals manufacturer, for instance, boasts that it makes 2.5 million ready meals a week.
When large industrial plants are churning out such a product volume, you might think that public health authorities would drop in at intervals to check that everything is up to scratch. That happens, but not as frequently as you might assume. Official statistics show, for example, that more than 55 per cent of all registered UK food establishments did not receive a local authority health inspection or audit in the year April 2012 to March 2013. Julia Long, the Unite union’s national officer for the food sector, sums up this situation as follows:
Food processing is one of our fastest-growing industries, employing hundreds of thousands of workers. The industry needs an inspection regime that respects this and understands that public safety and confidence are paramount. At the moment, thanks to the running down of the service, a business can look forward to an inspection only once in a blue moon.
Instead, the food industry is largely left to monitor its own food hygiene and safety procedures, using a system known as HACCP: Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point. This involves continuously monitoring every ‘critical control point’ where a likely hazard might arise – food poisoning bacteria, cross-contamination, and more – and keeping copious trails of paperwork to show that all possible checks have been vigilantly carried out. The emphasis in food chain regulation these days is on internal prevention, not external, independent inspection.
And yet, a lot can go wrong quickly when you manufacture convenience food at considerable speed on an industrial scale, and if it does, the consequences are extremely serious. If you’re talking food poisoning, the affected batch will have been loaded onto lorries, trucked to supermarket distribution centres, and laid out on shelves, making thousands of people ill within hours, in which case, there will be hell to pay. If the problem is rogue allergens, manufacturers will have to meet the considerable cost of a product recall. The penalties that can be imposed on them by retailers are severe, everything from being fined to losing the business.
The authorities will become involved, which is something of an embarrassment for the retailer, with knock-on consequences for the manufacturer. It could mean a ‘trade recall’, the recovery of the product from distribution centres, wholesalers, hospitals, restaurants, other major catering establishments, as well as other food processors, and/or it might also lead to a ‘consumer recall’, a complete withdrawal of the products from retail outlets. Product recall notices will have to be displayed in stores, along the lines of ‘If you have bought one of the products listed above, do not eat it. Instead, return it to the store it was bought from for a full refund or contact customer services’. Hundreds of thousands of refunds will have to be paid out.
Yet despite the dire consequences manufacturers face when their production goes wrong, recalls are surprisingly common in the UK. Barely a week goes by without one. Sometimes there are several recalls in one day. Take, for instance, 25 February 2014, when the Food Standards Agency (FSA) issued the following alert:
Sainsbury’s has recalled its ‘by Sainsbury’s’ Frozen Sticky Toffee Sponge Pudding, because the product may contain small pieces of metal.
This communication was swiftly followed by another:
Marks & Spencer has withdrawn its Lightly Dusted Salt and Pepper British Chicken Fillets because a small number of packs contain egg, which is not mentioned on the label. This makes the product a possible health risk for anyone who is allergic or has an intolerance to egg.
And yet another:
Sainsbury’s has withdrawn all packs of Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Roasted Chestnut, Toasted Hazelnut & Thyme Stuffing because the product may contain traces of peanut due to cross contamination during manufacturing. This is not mentioned on the label making the product a possible health risk for anyone who is allergic to peanuts.
Presence of allergens is by far the most common reason for product recalls, but why is this? Obsessed with being cost-effective, many food processors operate the food factory equivalent of hot-desking by redeploying the same plant equipment and assembly line, often in the course of a day, to make several different products. So a factory will be set up to handle a range of foods of one production type. For instance, a factory geared up for continuous production of smooth products with small particles can handle soups, sauces, desserts, baby food purées, fruit and tomato preparations. One with a continuous instant and dehydrated line is custom built to manufacture things like packet soups, gravy granules and stock powders.
Whatever the factory specialism, every last bit of equipment should be thoroughly cleaned and sanitised between batches of different products so that each new batch starts from a clean slate, but the frequency and regularity of allergen recalls shows that this is not always the case. ‘Nut Trace Contamination’ (NTC) warnings on processed foods that read ‘may contain nuts/nut traces’ or ‘produced in a factory using nuts’, are ostensibly aimed at people who suffer from nut allergies. In extreme cases, they can develop a severe, life-threatening reaction, anaphylaxis. However, the ubiquity of NTC warnings on manufactured products hints at the underlying problem of controlling factory food. Such warnings are an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that because of the sheer complication and complexity of the factory equipment, and the speed of production, manufacturers do not have, and can never have, total control of what ends up in their food. In fact, preventing cross-contamination, be that from peanuts or any other ingredient, is quite beyond them.
Unless you suffer from nut allergies – in which case it’s a matter of life and death, you may have only been mildly perplexed by the appearance of NTC warnings on products where nuts aren’t listed as an ingredient. Why would there be nuts in your pitta bread, chilli con carne seasoning mix, or your ready-to-heat Thai vegetable soup, after all? When the FSA researched consumers’ views of NTC warnings, people told them in no uncertain terms that they were unclear as to their meaning. ‘The equivocal nature of the phrases had been universally resented by respondents’, the FSA reported. Furthermore, they were ‘seen as an insurance policy for manufacturers’. That conclusion is shrewd. Food manufacturers do spend a lot of time watching their backs and limiting their liability precisely because they are in a high-risk business.