Meet the women behind our best biscuits
TAKE A MAGICAL TOUR OF UXBRIDGE’S FAMOUS MCVITIE’S FACTORY
AS a child I read Charlie and the Chocolate factory and dreamed of the magical places where my favourite foods were made.
Sadly, when growing up, I realised these places aren’t run by Oompa Loompa’s and don’t have rivers of chocolate, while their processes can be recognised as chemistry and physics at play rather than ‘magic’.
However, when I was invited to go behind the scenes at the McVitie’s factory in Harlesden, I could not help but dream that dream once more.
The factory, in Waxlow Road, has been manufacturing biscuits for more than 100 years, but they used to make much more. In fact, the factory has even been called upon by the Royal Family to make cakes for big occasions.
In 1947 McVitie’s made the £500 wedding cake for the future Queen of England, Princess Elizabeth, which was nine-foot tall and would have cost almost £14,000 in today’s money.
For Prince William’s wedding in 2011, there was a further break from tradition as the company was given a recipe from the royal household – for chocolate biscuit cake using their Rich Tea biscuits.
The cake was one of his grandmother’s favourites as a child, so the future Duke and Duchess of Cambridge shared a top secret family recipe with bakers at the Harlesden factory to carry on the tradition.
However delicious these one-off cakes must have been, they pale in comparison with what this factory is really special for – the gargantuan amount of biscuits it pumps out each and every day.
Harlesden is home to the second largest biscuit factory in the world by production, but the actual footprint of the factory is surprisingly small.
Factory general manager Nina Sparks would have you believe that is because they have more than 100 years of learned experience.
That is probably why they can make 132,000 tonnes of products every year including Digestives, Chocolate Digestives, Rich Tea, Hobnobs and the Jacob’s Mini Cheddars line of products, utilising a workforce of 600 people from 50 nationalities.
They produce 80,000 biscuits every single day, but how is the Chocolate Digestive, which was crowned Britain’s Favourite Biscuit by two separate polls in the past six months, really made?
It all starts with stealthy deliveries of chocolate from another factory in Manchester. They come in the dead of the night so as to avoid any traffic delays which might cause a batch to go off.
The flour arrives and is rolled into the biscuit batter.
We meet the digestives first when falling chunks of batter are pressed into discs by the Digestive mould. This is a big brass roller which cuts the round biscuit shape and prints in the McVitie’s name, logo and those small holes you see on one side of the biscuit.
Next, they are baked in ovens that have been running in Harlesden for more than 50 years. These gloriously art-deco 1960s cream coloured ovens run the entire width of the factory.
They’ve had various bits of electrics attached to make the process more synchronised, more economical and to keep a closer eye on what’s happening, but its just simple old-school technology at heart.
It is hard to resist the smell of a bakery let alone one of this epic scale, and the warmth coming off the ovens gives you a curious feeling.
I can only describe it as the exact opposite of spine-chilling.
Suddenly I am eight years old again and the magical vision of the factory is back.
Traversing the length of the ovens is enough to work up an appetite, which is lucky as on the other end are piping hot, freshly baked and stunningly soft digestive biscuits.
The biscuits not only tasted indescribable, they were shooting out of the machine and around a corner, curling like a biscuit rainbow. The clever engineers at McVitie’s even found a way for the furthest away biscuits to travel faster than the ones on the inside corner so they all reach their end-point at the same time.
Or maybe it is that magic I was talking about.
No sooner had they appeared from the blazing red orifice at the end of the oven, that they were whisked away from sight where some are destined to remain as plain digestives while others are selected to be anointed with a layer of chocolate and become Britain’s favourite biscuit.
It is impossible to overstate how happy I am entering this next room. I found my river of chocolate.
It is instantly identifiable by the smell, reminiscent of childhood cuddles with your teddy bear, playing football on the school’s playground or even getting a nice pat on the shoulder from your father.
The chocolate river, despite being barely visible thanks to the bulky machine it flows through, has transported me. I wanted so badly to dive in a la Augustus Gloop, but there is lots of machinery in the way, so I holster my
deepest desire and listen to Nina Sparks explain this process.
Digestives on a wire mesh travel over the chocolate river, getting licked with a coat of smooth milk chocolate before being flipped on to another mesh conveyor belt which carries them through a cooling process.
The wire mesh is what gives that grid like texture to the chocolate surface of the biscuit. Also, the chocolate actually goes on the bottom of the biscuit, not the top as you might expect. Cooled and set, the biscuit is now what you would buy in the supermarkets – it just needs to find a dozen or so friends and get packaged up. Digestives come spilling down a chute which is vibrating the biscuits down into a series of long tubes which work a bit like the coin machines at an arcade.
The biscuits at the front are pushed forward by the biscuits behind, that constant pressure forcing them into an orderly queue. An incredible machine then assembles the biscuits into a neat line which is enveloped in plastic and sealed. It is then sucked up by a rather fancy-looking robot, definitely not 50 years old, and put into a box.
These boxes are then stacked on to pallets by even fancier robots, each of which is named after a major London rail terminus such as Waterloo, King’s Cross or Paddington. These stacked pallets now go to a warehouse in the Midlands, before radiating out to supermarkets across the country.
Some special pallets (around 16% of them) are shipped out of the country to
be enjoyed by expats, anglophiles and those who cannot resist the charm of the chocolate digestive.
Some of this process is the same it has been for decades but it is not easy keeping a factory on the fringes of inner London. That is where people like Nina Sparks come in, setting up new processes and production lines.
However, McVitie’s owner Pladis also recognised that something should be done to help train its staff to take up more senior positions within the factory, resulting in the introduction of advanced team members.
They get special engineering training and are given the responsibility of handling minor issues during their shifts.
As a result, more women than ever are entering into the more senior positions at the factory and the Harlesden team were recently
given the Festival of Learning Employer’s Award.
Nina, whose favourite biscuit is a chocolate Hobnob, is a proud and vocal exponent of engineering as a career for women. As well as gearing up to launch a women in engineering workshop with local schools, she has also taken on some mentees interested in the traditionally male-dominated profession.
“I chose engineering because its a good degree and I didn’t think it would close any doors for me,” says Nina.
“I knew that I didn’t want to do something really super, super technical. I wanted to be surrounded by people and teams of people so joining a manufacturing organisation was a really good fit.”
Local MP Dawn Butler was also on the tour, examining the increasing role women are playing at the
factory since her last visit a few years back.
“Everyone always talks about McVitie’s mainly because they can smell the fresh biscuit smell in the air,” said Dawn.
“It’s always nice to see the improvements, the technology, the number of women who are in engineering, the number of women who are on the floor, the diversity of the staff, knowing that 50 languages are spoken here. It really is something to be proud of.
“I’m positive that businesses like Pladis can make a big difference raising awareness of the benefits of a career in engineering and ensure a better representation of women across all levels of the UK’s engineering workforce.”
Maybe the sense of magic I felt at the factory had a little less to do with the biscuits and a little more to do with the people.
I wanted so badly to dive in a la Augustus Gloop, but there is lots of machinery in the way, so I holster my deepest desire