Featured Image Credit: Tyla/BBC
Topics: BBC, Documentaries, Food and Drink, Twitter
Jess Hardiman
Sometimes it’s better not to know exactly what goes into the manufacturing process of popular foods, although it’s often fascinating when you do start delving.
A new BBC documentary went behind the scenes of how Quavers are made, and let’s just say it delivered a fair few bombshells.
In the latest episode of Inside the Factory, presenter Paddy McGuinness visited a crisp factory in Lincoln.
"This is what I've been waiting for my whole life,” he joked as he found out that 1.8 million Quavers tumble out of the fryer there every single hour.
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He was shown how starch powder left behind during the factor’s crisp-making process is added into a huge mixer, along with fine rice and soya flours and then a ‘mild seasoning’ of salt, pepper, onion powder and yeast.
The whole lot is mixed with water to create a dough and, after mixing, the dough is forced under very high pressure through an extruder, emerging as a continuous one-millimetre-thick sheet - kind of like a lasagne sheet.
After being stretched over rollers and put through a steamer to increase moisture, the sheet of dough is chopped into 40mm pellets, which then go into a specialist fryer filled with sunflower oil heated to 200 degrees Celsius.
The heat of the oil causes any remaining water inside to turn to steam, puffing them and leaving tiny air holes, while the tension created when the dough was stretched causes them to contract and curl up.
Finally, the freshly-cooked curls travel through a huge metal drum to be coated in a cheese powder flavouring.
Because of the very specific process, manufacturing director Layla Whiting revealed that – despite popular belief – Quavers are not actually classified as crisps.
After watching the show, many people were left stunned by the manufacturing process and what it meant for how the ‘potato snacks’ are classified.
One person wrote on X: “Watching Paddy McGuinness on #insidethefactory this week Quavers and they are a snack not a crisp.”
Someone else said: “So a Quaver is a bi product to your crisp #insidethefactory.”
A while back, someone else also had the revelation independently of the programme, tweeting: “Hang on a minute. So Skips and Quavers aren’t crisps either? What do you call them? ‘Might go to the shop for a packet of potato snacks’? Be serious.”
Whiting told BBC Radio Lincolnshire it had been a great experience welcoming the BBC cameras into the factory.
"Firstly, the opportunity to showcase our great people, who perfect the Quaver on a daily basis, but just having him here was amazing," she said.
She added that McGuinness - who previously worked in factories as a teenager for a Saturday job - also knew the environment and 'integrated with our people really well'.