Making a packet

Get a taste of life behind the scenes of the world’s largest crisp production plant

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We eat an estimated 90million packets of crisps a week in the UK but do you know what goes into making each bag?

Channel 4 is taking us behind the scenes of the Walkers Crisp Factory in Leicester, where more than 11million packets of crisps are produced from more than 700 tonnes of potatoes every day.

Hundreds of people work at the factory and manufacturing manager Louise tells the cameras: “We are a bit of a bunch of potato geeks.”

The documentary looks at how the potatoes are processed and reveals how an optical sorter fishes out any dodgy potatoes or foreign objects. It's a vital part of the process — it once found an old grenade that had been dug up with the spuds.