Gregg Wallace famously enjoys a swift one-two. This week he delivered another one - MasterChef, followed by Spring’s Supermarket Secrets (BBC1, 9pm, 3 April) where he revealed the tricks supermarkets use to ensure we can eat whatever we want, whenever we want it.
Spring is the second-biggest supermarket sales event of the year, worth £5.5bn, including £450m on Easter Eggs (if there are any left on shelf) and we saw how Easter Eggs become hollow, how Sainsbury’s makes hot cross buns, how a modified greenhouse confuses daffodils into sprouting early and how we buy 3.5 million more eggs every day in the run-up to Pancake Day, creating a “short, sharp spike” in demand.
The explanation of how supermarkets meet that demand was disappointingly prosaic (20% of eggs usually go straight to the baking industry, at Easter 100% hit the shelves), but it got interesting when we saw how thunderstorms can freak out chickens, resulting in giant misshapen eggs covered in weird ridges. If the hen was stressed out before she laid one, she’d have been really freaked out afterwards.
We then headed to a Waitrose factory that processes 2 million eggs a day. Over £3.5m of equipment picked and packed eggs, detecting cracked ones and sending them down a chute into the bin, Veruca Salt-style. It’s fast. And “more sensitive than any human could ever be” meaning all its eggs reach the shelves in perfect condition.
“From bum to pan, as quick as you can,” said the man from Waitrose. Putting me off eggs for the second time in an hour.
