Bosses of a real-life Willy Wonka factory that makes 450 MILLION Mini Rolls a year have given a sneak peek inside where the magic happens.
The Premier Foods factory in Moreton, Merseyside, uses up swimming pools worth of chocolate every Easter and calls itself the “Home of the Mini Roll”.Inside, waterfalls of chocolate pour onto millions of cakes, while hundreds of workers help top cakes with Mini Eggs before robots pack the sweet treats and send them off to hungry customers around the globe. Workers are particularly busy at this time of year making all kinds of delicious cakes for Easter.
The Premier Foods factory in Moreton, Merseyside, uses up swimming pools worth of chocolate every Easter and calls itself the “Home of the Mini Roll”.Inside, waterfalls of chocolate pour onto millions of cakes, while hundreds of workers help top cakes with Mini Eggs before robots pack the sweet treats and send them off to hungry customers around the globe. Workers are particularly busy at this time of year making all kinds of delicious cakes for Easter.
The plant was originally built by Cadbury’s and today, under Premier Foods, it still makes only Cadbury cakes, reports the Liverpool Echo. General manager Jay McDermott and operations manager Glen Annison have also divulged some behind the scenes secrets. They include that the factory makes more than 20 Mini Rolls a second - totalling 1,350 Mini Rolls a minute. If all the Mini Rolls made in an hour were laid out, they would stretch the length of 60 football pitches.
General manager Jay said: “We reckon if you laid them out end to end, they’d get to Australia and three-quarters of the way back.”Every year the plant makes some 600 million cakes - also including Halloween, Christmas and Easter specials. At Easter, up to 50m cakes are made. They use 23m Mini Eggs a year, as well as 17 tonnes of liquid chocolate a day.
Glen reckons that every Easter season it uses the equivalent of two Olympic swimming pools filled to the brim with chocolate. Jay said: “We’ll start production for Easter in January time, and we start seeing the cakes in shops by the end of January.”The plant normally employs more than 450 staff. But in the peak period making cakes for Christmas and Easter, the workforce rises to 600. The plant is this year making a new range of Caramel Mini Rolls for Easter.
Cadbury’s started work on its giant Moreton site in 1951 and started making cakes in 1953. Jay said: “They chose it allegedly because of the cooling quality of the Mersey air to cool the bakery down. It doesn’t feel that way in summer.”The first Mini Rolls were made in 1962. The Cadbury site was later split into three parts. The Premier site still makes Cadbury cakes, while tea giant Typhoo occupies another part of the site and biscuit giant Burton’s is in the other. Jay said: “We’ve been here a long time and we’re ingrained locally.“We have had generations of families working at the site. It’s not uncommon to have people working here whose grandparents once worked here. We have brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles.
And Glen added: “We also have a low turnover. Once people come, they often stay.“We’ve got one person who’s coming up to 50 years working here. It’s not uncommon to have people working here for 35 years.”And who could resist being surrounded by chocolate all day!