Inside a frozen pizza factory

The BBC (via Kottke) has a fascinating video of a tour inside a frozen pizza factory. (You have to sit through an annoying ad before the video).

The pizza factory produces 2 million frozen pizzas a week - a very scary statistic. They don’t look like anything I’d ever want to eat but it’s cool watching the tomato sauce squirt onto the bases, and then the pepperoni be chopped down from huge human-sized chunks.

The article mentions that the food industry is prospering with the credit crunch and people not eating out as much - which is a bit sad, considering now is the perfect time to learn to cook. Buying fresh ingredients and making food from scratch is still cheaper than buying frozen ready-made meals.

I’ve just finished a writing course with John Newton, called Writing about Food. (I definitely recommend this course for anyone with the slightest interest in food writing - it was fascinating). He mentioned as an aside that it was about an eighth cheaper to make Macaroni and Cheese from scratch with nice fresh parmasan than it was to buy the “convenience” packet.

If you were thinking of setting up any “How to cook” or “Where to buy produce” websites then it sounds like now is the perfect time.

There’s also another video here of bread being hand-made in an Austrian factory. It’s awesome to see the process, it’s such an assembly line and it really seems to works seamlessly.

The video also makes me really want a Canon EOS 5D - it’s an amazing quality video, especially considering this was filmed with natural light and no tripod.

This post is tagged under: random thoughts