Jammy Biscuits

Paddy McGuinness explores the secrets of the Jammie Dodgers factory in south Wales, revealing how they produce a whopping 4.4 billion biscuits a year.

In this episode, Paddy is in great spirits as he gets to know the factory staff, many of whom have worked there for decades. At this site, which has been making biscuits since 1939, Paddy's following the production of an icon in the biscuit world, the Jammie Dodger!

First up, Paddy meets head of R&D Gemma James and shift operations manager Jamie Caswell, who are weighing out some of the key ingredients for the biscuits, including a raising agent and a powder which acts as a butter replacement. But starting as he means to go on, Paddy wants to know an important fact: what do they dunk their biscuits into? To his mock horror, Gemma reveals it's a cup of herbal tea!

Paddy and Gemma head to the mixing area, just in time to see a huge lump of biscuit dough exit an industrial mixer. The dough is transported to the biscuit-moulding area of the factory, where Paddy meets general manager Rebecca Phillips. But before he discovers how the biscuits are made, it's the same dunking question for Rebecca! This time, Paddy is delighted with her answer: ‘a strong cup of tea'. To make the biscuit sandwich, she tells him that a huge brass roller creates 2,880 Jammie Dodger tops and bottoms every minute.

With the freshly moulded biscuits making their way through the factory, Paddy's taking the time to chat to members of staff, including a lady who has worked at the factory for an astonishing 30 years. Meanwhile, the biscuits travel through an epic conveyor oven, the length of eight double-decker buses, and after just eight minutes, they emerge a beautiful golden brown. Paddy can't resist having a taste – delicious, even without the jam, he says.

To sort the ingredient that the Jammie Dodger is famous for, Paddy and factory manager Rebecca stop off at the ‘depositor', where precisely 4.8 grams of smooth, raspberry-flavoured jam is dolloped onto the bottom half of every biscuit. Then, almost immediately, small vacuum cups lift and place the top halves to make the perfect jam sandwich. Paddy is given a very special taste, something his six-year-old self would have loved: biting into a warm Dodger straight off the line. He's in biscuit heaven!

Paddy follows the finished biscuits through the vast factory and watches as they're wrapped in packs of eight and travel on towards the packing department. There, Rebecca has a challenge for him – helping Jenny put the packets into boxes ready to leave the factory. Jenny has worked at the factory for over 34 years and even met her husband there. She makes the process of precisely placing the packs of biscuits into boxes look easy, but as Paddy finds out with hilarious consequences, it's anything but. Jumping ship, he leaves Jenny and her colleagues to clean up his mess and follows his biscuits to the dispatch area, where half a million jammy biscuits get loaded onto the back of a lorry and leave the site. Every day, four or five lorries leave the factory, which is capable of producing 2.2 million Dodgers a day.

Elsewhere in the episode, Cherry is astonished as she and a former Great British Bake Off contestant test which biscuit, scientifically speaking, is best for dunking. And she heads to a bakery near Leeds to learn how luscious marshmallows are made. Meanwhile, historian Ruth Goodman reveals how a million women risked their lives during the Second World War to provide a brew and biscuit where it was needed most. And she visits the site of an old biscuit factory, revealing a remarkable old film from 1906, showing how the factory in ‘Biscuit Town' in London produced hundreds of millions of biscuits a year.