Authors: Joanna Blythman
Forget the faff of grinding spices, or pulverising aromatics. Food manufacturers prefer to buy in ready-made ‘cuisine pastes’ from companies who understand ‘the total requirements of manufacturers of savoury foods, providing complete, tailored solutions for a wide range of applications’. As the marketing blurb for one such company expresses it, ‘our chef quality range of savoury ingredients deliver premium taste profiles and are dry blended to make your production process easier’.
A tub of ready-made pepper coating can be used to create an attractive crust, like that on a well-seasoned steak, or jerked chicken, as a flavouring for couscous and pasta salad, or to smarten up a flabby, defrosted salmon steak. Pass pallid poultry pieces through a machine that sprays on caramel before you cook it, and it will take on the Miami beach lifeguard bronze of a home-roast joint. A touch of liquid ham and cheese flavouring, incorporated into other liquid ingredients, will make your spaghetti carbonara smell particularly savoury. A hint of fish flavouring will reintroduce the memory of taste into the anodyne prawn in the middle of your sushi roll.
The composition of the products manufacturers use to flavour and lend personality to ready meals and other convenience foods varies but, in a nutshell, they bear only the most distant notional similarity to those traditionally available to the home cook, not least because they are often multi-ingredient items in their own right. Whatever their name and supposed ethnic identity, the master key recipe for these prêt-à-porter flavouring shortcuts doesn’t vary that much either. Whether wet or dry, it is hard to escape the same old roll call of starches, gums, sweeteners and salt, along with synthesised flavourings and colourings. In one typical supermarket Chinese-style pork rib ready meal, the glaze alone contains 17 ingredients: sugar, salt, cornflour, dried glucose syrup, tomato, garlic and beetroot powders, spices, guar gum, vegetable oil, and more.
But to food manufacturers, this custom-made shopping list makes total business sense. Why, for instance, would you shell out for butter when you can instead dose your recipe with 0.02 per cent butter extract that will, as one flavour company promises, give your products a ‘characteristic butter flavour … [that] works well with bakeries, confectionery, candies, ice cream, popcorn, cereals, dressings [and] combines well with vanilla and cocoa flavour’? Or, there is always the option of using butter powder. Described by one company that makes it as ‘a powdery, homogeneous and free-flowing cream to yellow powder’, it is manufactured by spray-drying a mixture of butter, maltodextrins (starch) and milk proteins; a real boon to manufacturers who want an up-market ‘made with butter’ promise on their product label, but who don’t want to fork out for the real thing. Butter is an expensive ingredient as far as food manufacturers are concerned. When you are churning out hundreds of tonnes of product a day, even a small reduction in the quantity you use can reduce ingredient costs significantly.
And why clog up your cold storage area with vats of real cream when you can use a ‘powdery, homogeneous and free flowing cream to yellow powder with a cream taste and smell’ that doesn’t need to be chilled, and takes up a fraction of the factory space?
To a manufacturer whose constant concern is reducing or at least containing costs in the face of regular price rises in raw materials, it seems quite logical to use, say, a powder made from freeze-dried apricots, blended with some type of starch, that smells just enough like the fresh fruit to pass muster in your Danish pastries or yogurt, rather than much more expensive fresh apricots, or frozen apricot pulp.
From water-injected poultry and powdered coagulated egg, to ultra-adhesive batters and pre-mixed marinades, the raw materials in industrial food manufacturing are rarely as simple as most of us would like to think. In fact, they commonly share quite complicated back-stories of processing and intervention that their labels don’t reveal. Indeed, they are predicated on ingredients that are processed, comprised versions of the real thing, far removed from their original forms.
The undisclosed hidden history of their ingredients helps explain why ready meals manufactured in factories cannot hold a candle to the competently homemade equivalent, prepared in a domestic or restaurant kitchen. It also sheds light on why supposedly different ready meals from different retailers taste so similar. The big supermarket chains that sell us these products share the same manufacturers. These manufacturers, in turn, share the same pool of ingredient suppliers. The specifications our multiple retailers give to manufacturers may vary marginally – one might prefer a runnier stew, the other a stickier one – but the industrial systems they are locked into leave little leeway for genuine variety. One conveyor belt, on a given day of the week, is dedicated to meals for Asda or Tesco, while another does pretty much the same thing for M&S and Sainsbury’s. One chain might specify a certain ingredient, say free-range pasteurised egg rather than the caged-hen equivalent, but no manufacturer can afford to alter their production system on request, especially when they very rarely have the security of proper contracts from retailers, only short-term agreements. So like a subscription to over-hyped satellite TV channels, the selection of ready meals on supermarket shelves, despite the apparent diversity, is surprisingly homogenous in terms of its contents.
And if the larder used by manufacturers is, shall we say, samey, what of the production method? In the context of food processing, the word cooking merits permanent parenthesis because the techniques used are so radically different from the time-honoured equivalent as understood by cooks down the ages. Any good domestic cook making the meat ragù for a pasta dish, for instance, would begin by browning onions and mince before adding the liquid ingredients, in order to deepen the flavour. In food mass production, you can forget pre-browning. All the ingredients will be measured into one gigantic, temperature-controlled industrial vat and bubbled up for a specified time until they form a stew-like mass. Add a dash of extract of this, and powder of that, and hey presto, you have the recipe for a meat layer. A dose of caramel will compensate for the missing taste, colour and aroma that natural browning would have given the dish. A little added thickener, in one form or another, usually from cheap sweet starches and sticky gums, will give the illusion of the natural viscosity found in the patiently made traditional article. All that remains is to have the mixture spewed into plastic cartons, along with the other manufactured white sauce and pasta components, and passed through blisteringly hot, cavernous steam-injected ovens to ensure that your lasagne or pasta bake remains soft for reheating. A rapid cooling in a spiral chiller, a mechanical conveyor system that moves food through a continuous chilling process, and the job is done.
What you have here is a streamlined production system of assembly, amalgamation, fusion, combination and transformation by heat that very efficiently flattens out any slight lingering personality in already anonymous, much compromised ingredients. No wonder ready meals taste so spookily similar. If the beauty industry is in the business of selling hope in a jar, the factory food industry is in the business of selling hope in a plastic carton, under a cardboard sleeve. It promises us something near-instant and edible that tastes more or less like real, home-cooked food – a promise that it is structurally unable to deliver.
2
I now realise that I was naïve, but there was a time when I expected food processing companies to joyously announce their existence. I suppose that I had imagined factories with household names above the door, and proud signage explaining what they do. ‘Smith & Sons: delicious meals in minutes’, that sort of thing. I can’t think why I clung to this idea, because come to think of it, I had never stumbled upon any that fitted that bill.
It was only when I started searching out the companies that process our food that I understood why: they prefer to keep a low profile, on industrial estates in amongst other anonymous, big box industrial units. Such locations give them the space and freedom to operate day and night. There are no immediate neighbours to complain about noise or smells. Heavy lorries can come and go, without drawing the ire of the local community.
Considering the volume of products they manufacture, there are surprisingly few of these factories in the UK: think in tens and hundreds, not thousands. On the chilled food front, for instance, in 2013, just 25 major chilled food companies operated from 100 highly streamlined production sites, employing around 60,000 people.
These factories supply supermarket chains that do not want the hassle of dealing with a plurality of small or medium-sized companies. With the exception of Morrisons, which is unusual in that it owns its own dedicated meat processing facilities, UK chains prefer not to get hands-on with the products they sell. Although 95% of the chilled prepared food Britain eats is sold under a retailer’s brand, supermarket chains do not own the factories churning out the food and drink that bears their names. Instead, they devolve that expense, responsibility and potential risk to third-party suppliers who work at arm’s length, according to the chain’s specification.
In order to squeeze economies of scale from their investment, food manufacturers need to be turning out products on a fairly constant basis to make good on their outlay and investment. Time is money. Stop-start processing plants without a full production schedule don’t make commercial sense, so these enterprises commonly supply not one, but several supermarket chains, to attain that critical volume. One shift, it will be Sainsbury’s ready-to-grill kebabs gliding along the assembly line, the next, meatballs for Tesco, or chicken pies for Asda. Even those processed foods that are sold as familiar household brands – as opposed to supermarket own-label – are commonly manufactured by a company other than the one with its well-recognised name on the box.
This is why third-party factories have innocuous, neutral names that give little or no clue as to the nature of the enterprise. If you drive past them, they look anonymous and blank, like vast storage units. Unlike the characterful brick and stone factories that still remain from Victorian times, they have no windows.
Inside, their employees work long, demanding shifts: 12 hours isn’t unusual, sometimes night shifts. They tend to be young, and driven by a very strong work ethos, the kind of people who are prepared to take any job that’s going, seeing it as a stepping stone on the road to eventual financial betterment. Typically, some 90 per cent of the staff come from Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. In one workplace canteen I visited, the cook was Polish, making a daily bigos, Poland’s favourite cabbage and sausage stew.
Except for the odd tantalising glimpse of the external world from the canteen windows, these people work in artificial light, in a factory world. And outsiders most certainly cannot see in, a necessary measure to guard secret recipes and commercial confidentiality, we’re told.
So although these factories provide households up and down the land with billions of portions of processed food – half a million kebabs on just one day would not be unusual for a busy meat processing site – most of us haven’t a clue what these mammoth population-feeding units look like inside. They don’t run Doors Open Days, and any visitor, pre-arranged or otherwise, will be greeted by a uniformed guard, and a security barrier. Their unwritten motto? Transparency ain’t us. It’s not like the old days, when primary teachers would take classes to see a dairy farm and bottling plant so they could work up a cute little Day in the Life of a Pinta project. The prevailing sentiment amongst food manufacturers is that the less we have a mental picture of how our processed food is made, the better.
This defensiveness is understandable. Would most of us feel tempted by those attractively packaged and slickly marketed convenience foods, the sort of thing we choose in seconds then slip in the microwave of an evening, if we were allowed a sneak peek into the places where they were made? Not greatly, I’d wager. As for working there, they would definitely be one of the last places in the world that most people would ever want a job.
‘You see, we’re just a scaled-up version of a domestic kitchen’, one enthusiastic boss assured me as he showed me round his pride-and-joy ready meals factory. Another executive looked me in the eye and told me with apparent conviction, and perhaps a hint of nervousness, that his meat processing plant was ‘just like a biggish kitchen’. I nodded politely, but I didn’t get the analogy: it’s a food processor’s fairy tale with all the scary bits edited out.
Food manufacturers have created a body of lore and legend around their products that sounds tremendously comforting. ‘Recipes for these foods are gathered from all over the world and are created by chefs who are passionate about what they do’, says the Chilled Foods Association. ‘They [chefs] also like working with fresh ingredients and being involved right from the start – from initial concept to final food. They get their inspiration from different sources. Travel and cookery books are particularly important but they all love to experiment and research new ideas. Many chilled foods are hand-made in basically the same way as in the restaurant kitchen or in the home, so being able to create virtually any type of food is considered very satisfying.’
But whether they are geared up to manufacture crisps, frozen fish fingers, tinned fish, dried cereals, cheese slices, Rice Krispies®, or ready-to-microwave party canapés, factories don’t look, or feel, anything like a kitchen, even of the industrial catering sort. They more resemble car plants and oil refineries, or even the missile-launching pad at the end of
Dr No
, where James Bond sabotages the efforts of a small army of operatives, lost and almost robotic-looking within the bulk of their protective clothing.
Without a detailed, highly technical explanation, or a degree in engineering, chemical engineering, microelectronics, microbiology or food technology, most of us would find it extremely hard to see any parallels with domestic food production in these cavernous factories, because there are precious few sensual or visual cues. It’s not at all like those appetite-whetting TV adverts for pasta sauces, fish fingers, and other processed foods that show ‘our chefs’ in homely yet aspirational kitchens, surrounded by sensual displays of fresh, whole ingredients. It is most certainly not a dream job of browsing through recipe books and playing around with the world’s finest and freshest ingredients. In fact, it is actually relatively rare to see anything that looks much like food as we know it in these factories, and when you do, it will most likely be swathed in strong plastic, in giant tins and cartons, or packed in cardboard boxes and stored in a freezer.