Inside The Factory: Cheese Curls: Best TV On Tonight

In this episode, Paddy McGuinness delves into the secrets of the Walkers factory in Lincoln to uncover how it produces an astounding 500 million packs of Quavers annually.

Paddy begins his journey with factory manager Layla Whiting, who dispels a common misconception: cheese curls aren’t officially considered crisps. Unlike crisps, made from sliced potatoes, Quavers are crafted from potato starch powder, a by-product of the crisp-making process. Their first stop is a massive mixer where the potato starch is combined with fine rice and soya flours, along with a mild seasoning of salt, pepper, onion powder, and yeast—but still no cheese flavor at this stage. Water is added, forming a pliable dough.

The factory’s intense heat takes Paddy by surprise, prompting him to compare it to “landing on the sun!” He perseveres to witness the next steps of production. The dough is pressed through an extruder at high pressure, emerging as a thin, lasagna-like sheet—far from the curly snack Paddy expected.

To achieve Quavers’ signature shape, the dough is stretched over rollers to create tension before passing through an 18-meter-long steamer. This raises the dough’s moisture content to 40%, making it stretchy and pliable. After cooling, the dough is cut into small 13mm by 40mm pellets at a staggering rate of 7,900 per minute. These pellets, still too moist, are dried to reduce their moisture content to 11%.

In the frying area, Paddy learns how 1.2 tonnes of pellets are fried every hour. Heated sunflower oil at 200°C causes the moisture to evaporate as steam, puffing the pellets and creating tiny air pockets. The tension from the dough-stretching process now causes the curls to form their iconic shape. After just 20 seconds in the fryer, 1.8 million perfectly puffed curls emerge each hour, but they still lack their cheesy flavor.

To complete the process, the curls travel through a large metal drum, where an exact amount of cheese powder is applied, giving them their unmistakable taste. After a taste test, Paddy follows the freshly cooked curls to the packing area. A multi-head weigher portions out 16 grams of cheese curls, and another machine seals them into packets. These packets are then sorted into groups of six by a robot and packed into multipacks.

Finally, the multipacks are boxed, stacked on pallets, and transported to the dispatch area, where Paddy learns that each lorry is loaded with 93,600 packets before heading to stores across the country.

Earlier in the episode, Cherry investigates how potato starch powder is derived from crisp production at a Walkers factory. She also visits another factory in Leicester to see how 10 million bags of Bombay Mix are made annually.

Meanwhile, historian Ruth Goodman uncovers the origins of cheese flavoring, invented by American military scientists during World War II.