Soft Drinks
Documentary series. Gregg Wallace explores Ribena's Gloucestershire factory. Meanwhile, Cherry Healey is in the lab figuring out why fizzy drinks are so appealing.
Gregg Wallace explores Ribena's Gloucestershire factory. It turns 90 per cent of Britain's blackcurrants into soft drinks, producing three million bottles a week. Gregg takes delivery of 500 tonnes of blackcurrants at a cider mill in Somerset. The harvest comes in during July and August, when there are no apples to process for cider, so they press blackcurrants instead. Gregg discovers how the aroma of the blackcurrants is captured separately and later added back into the drink. Next, the concentrate and aromas are transported to the drinks factory, where they are mixed with 11 other ingredients before being bottled. Gregg watches a machine that can create a plastic bottle in 0.1 of a second and learns why nitrogen is the secret to creating a bottle that won't get stuck in vending machines.
Cherry Healey is harvesting the berries on a farm in Kent - one of 40 that supply the factory. She also heads to the Netherlands to a plant that recycles plastics. It processes two and a half million used PET bottles a day, transforming them into 4mm pellets that can be turned back into drinks bottles. And Cherry is in the lab figuring out why fizzy drinks are so appealing. She learns that bubbles play sensory tricks on us, making fizzy drinks taste colder, less sweet and more flavourful than their still equivalents.
Ruth Goodman is investigating the origins of fizzy drinks. Carbonated water was first sold by Mr Schweppe in 1783, but it was a British husband-and-wife team - Robert and Mary White - who were to popularise fizzy pop. In 1890, R White's styled itself as the world's biggest drinks company and they sold 46 million bottles a year. Ruth looks at why we associate barley water with the great British summertime.
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Pumarosa
Priestess
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Birdy
Keeping Your Head Up
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Bastille
Campus
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Coldplay
Birds
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Coldplay
Birds
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The Phoenix Foundation
Buffalo
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Coldplay
Up & Up
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Olly Murs
24 HRS
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William Walton
Spitfire Prelude And Fugue
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Chase & Status
This Moment - Instrumental
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Picture This
Let's Be Young
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Katy Perry
Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)
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Hot Butter
Popcorn
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The New Dave Pike Set
Mathar
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Solomon Grey
Firechild
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Take That
Giants
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Rita Ora
Your Song
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Coldplay
Birds
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Kungs
Don't You Know (feat. Jamie N Commons)
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Robert Farnon, Queen's Hall Light Orchestra
Sporting Occasion
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Agnes Obel
Riverside
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Empire of the Sun
High And Low
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Empire of the Sun
High And Low
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Sigma
Find Me (feat. Birdy)
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Emeli Sand茅
Highs & Lows
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Richard Ashcroft
Hold On
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Lauren Aquilina
Oceans
Credits
Role | Contributor |
---|---|
Presenter | Gregg Wallace |
Presenter | Cherry Healey |
Presenter | Ruth Goodman |
Executive Producer | Alice Harper |
Executive Producer | Sanjay Singhal |
Series Producer | Amanda Lyon |
Director | Michael Rees |
Producer | Emma Pound |
Production Manager | Sally Finigan |
Production Company | Voltage TV Productions Ltd |
Producer | Sam Bailey |
Director | Sam Bailey |
Producer | Will Aspinall |
Director | Will Aspinall |
Learn more about the history of the factory and how it has evolved with an interactive from The Open University.
The fascinating stories behind the production of some of our favourite products.