Inside the Factory: Baked Beans

Documentary series. Gregg Wallace helps to unload 27 tonnes of dried haricot beans from North America and follows them on a one and a half mile journey through the largest baked bean factory in the world, which makes more than three million cans of beans every 24 hours. Gregg discovers how a laser scrutinizes every single bean, how the spice recipe for the sauce is a secret known only by two people and how the beans are not baked at all! Cherry Healey follows the journey of a discarded baked bean can through a recycling centre and on to the largest steelworks in the UK. She also takes a can that is 14 months after its best before date to a lab at the University of Coventry and is amazed when tests reveal it has the same Vitamin C levels compared to fresh tomatoes. Historian Ruth Goodman reveals how tinned food was invented to prevent British seamen developing scurvy on their long voyages at sea. Ruth also relates how Henry Heinz first marketed baked beans in the UK in the early 1900s.