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When it comes to tasting ready meals, the flavour profiles are every bit as monotone as the smells. Tasted blind and mashed up to disguise any tell-tale texture, one might easily mix up a sausage casserole with barbecue spare ribs, or confuse Mexican chicken fajitas with sweet and sour chicken. Why is this?
It all began to fall into place when I was in the test kitchen of a ready meals factory, where food technologists check the taste and ‘visuals’ (appearance) of the day’s output to ensure that they conform to a tight specification. ‘The objective’, one executive explained. ‘is to see that the consumer gets the same taste experience every time’. Now this explained a lot. When you stop to think about it, home-cooked food varies all the time. For a kick-off, it reflects the cook’s mood. Anyone who cooks can testify to how an oft-made recipe can turn out differently, depending on your mental state; harassed and rushed perhaps, serene and calm maybe, or even distracted and not fully engaged. Patiently caramelised onions one day can be burnt threads the next. There’s a fine line between a custard sauce that obligingly coats the back of the spoon, and a bowlful of curdled egg.
The ingredients for home cooking also vary in subtle but palpable ways. One brand of tinned tomatoes doesn’t give quite the same result as another. Lemons yield variable amounts of juice. Some bunches of herbs can be more aromatic than others, some spices fresher. Seasons make their presence felt too. Fresh summer garlic is sweet and subtle; the same bulb, stale, overwintered and used in March, can have a blunderbuss effect on a dish. Stewing beef bought from the supermarket, and encased in plastic with gases to keep it looking ruby red, will cook differently from the same cut, simply wrapped in waxed and brown paper, purchased from an independent butcher.
You may be a huge fan of your mum’s homemade steak pie but have to admit that, this week, it didn’t taste quite as great as usual. Or the opposite might be the case. One night, for no apparent reason, a familiar stir-fry suddenly seems to have acquired a mystery X factor. Was it that the peppers were less watery? Was the oil hotter because of that phone call? Was it down to the noticeable freshness and lack of fibre in that particularly good-looking root ginger?
It’s the intrinsic variation that makes home-cooked food eternally interesting, but variation is the sworn enemy in industrial food processing. Indeed, all the systems put in place by manufacturers of ready meals and other convenience food lines are geared to eliminating it. The whole purpose of the endeavour is to iron out every possible high and low, and produce a totally standard product that always looks and tastes identical, 365 days of the year. As one government food safety manual puts it: ‘To achieve a consistent product with the same appearance, flavour, shelf life, etc., it is important that the ingredient quantities, quality and the processing steps are always the same’.
The lengthy process of achieving this begins with the food manufacturer’s shopping list. The aim here is to have maximum control over ingredients, to ensure that they are always identical. On an industrial scale, this means buying in ingredients to a very tight specification from specialised companies. Surprising though it might sound to the home cook for whom ingredient preparation is probably the largest component of the cooking effort, food manufacturers carry out little or no preparation of raw ingredients. Instead they buy them in substantially pre-prepared. So, contrary to the notion that ready meals and other convenience foods are brought to you by a company that does all the hard work, it would be more accurate to say that they come from a company that ‘cooks’ products made with a list (often long) of ingredients and sundry additives that have already undergone some form of preparation by several other companies. In other words, the company that appears to be saving you work (usually a supermarket), is devolving that work to another company (a food manufacturer), which in turn gets other companies (food processors) to do the prep for it. These processors, in turn, may be quite remote from the primary food producers: farmers and growers.
The convenience food chain that supplies the consumer is made up of many links, links that often cross continents. In food manufacturing logic, this elongated chain is not at all crazy, quite the opposite. After all, the basis of any automated industrial manufacturing, be it cars or chicken tikka, is breaking down all the necessary production stages into component parts that can be carried out by separate teams on the assembly line.
The Chilled Food Association presents its industry’s products as ‘local’ because ‘virtually all chilled prepared foods are made in the UK’, but the ingredients used to make the finished products are often anything but. It quotes one development chef as saying: ‘Food should be simple, well cooked and flavoursome, with minimal amount of handling. It is also essential to use the best available ingredients to hand and promote local produce wherever possible.’ A statement somewhat at odds with industry recruitment literature, which describes ‘sourcing fresh ingredients globally from carefully chosen suppliers’ as a key part of the job.
In fact, the food manufacturer’s shopping list is thoroughly international. When an ITV Tonight investigation, Food Facts and Fiction, commissioned a UK food technologist with extensive experience of food manufacturing to make a very traditional British-sounding lamb hotpot ready meal of the type commonly sold by supermarkets, he came up with a product made from 16 ingredients, sourced from ten different countries, including New Zealand lamb, Israeli carrots, Argentinian beef bones and Majorcan potatoes.
This invented ready meal might sound like a media stunt, but in fact it doesn’t give a full flavour of the globalised sourcing of food processing companies. When the Food Safety Authority of Ireland analysed the components of one particular pizza brand that bore a ‘country of origin Ireland’ label, it found that it was made from 35 different ingredients that passed through 60 countries, on five different continents. This was the breakdown:
Dough: France, UK, Poland, USA
Yeast: UK, Ireland, Germany
Salt: UK, France, China
Sugar: Brazil, Indonesia, Jamaica, UK
Herbs: Greece, Italy, Spain, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Morocco
Tomato paste: Italy, France, Netherlands
Cheese: Switzerland, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, UK, Netherlands
Chicken: Brazil, Ireland, UK, Netherlands, Germany
Anchovies: Peru, Argentina, Italy, Falkland Islands, Spain, Iceland, Denmark
Pepperoni: Poland, Italy, Ireland, UK, Denmark, USA
Vegetables: ‘from a host of Mediterranean countries’
Olive oil: Italy, Greece, Spain
Chilli peppers: Africa, Asia, South America
Irrespective of which country they are buying from, if food manufacturers can buy an ingredient in frozen form, they will. That may seem surprising, even counterintuitive, given that they often go on to sell them chilled as ‘fresh’, but freezing is seen by food processors, quite correctly, as the safest way of storing ingredients to protect them against any food poisoning risk. Frozen ingredients are also easy for industrial food manufacturers to handle. They don’t arrive at the delivery bay with a stopwatch ticking, needing to be cooked promptly. Instead they can be, and are, stored for months, even years, and brought out as and when they are needed. So most of the meat, fish and vegetables arrive at the factory gate in a frozen state, already months, possibly years, old.
By buying in frozen food, manufacturers liberate their purchasing from the vagaries of the seasons and price fluctuations, and benefit from buying ingredients in frozen bulk on a global market. So, unless the label specifies otherwise, it’s highly probable, for instance, that the chicken in your ready meal was purchased frozen from either Thailand or Brazil. Around 40 per cent of the chicken we eat in the UK is imported, almost all of it destined for food processing or catering. If required, large chicken exporters in these countries will also obligingly supply that frozen chicken pre-cooked, and/or ‘marinated’: injected with water, cornflour, salt, and even other flavourings. Few consumers notice the tell-tale label description (‘cooked ma
rinated chicken breast’) not unreasonably assuming that when a product contains chicken, that means 100 per cent chicken, probably British, the sort you’d cook at home, with nothing else added.
It’s an eye-opener to see the ingredient storage zones of food factories. In a typical operation, almost all the meat, be it chicken, lamb, pork or beef, is bought in frozen. So before it can be used it has to be defrosted for five to six minutes. Don’t for a second imagine that in big food manufacturing plants there are lines of people patiently peeling mounds of carrots and potatoes. In your typical industrial-scale factory, 80–90 per cent of all fresh vegetables are purchased in frozen form.
As anyone who cooks from scratch knows, many savoury recipes begin with chopping onions and finely mincing garlic, but food manufacturers do away with all that fuss. Instead they typically use pre-peeled frozen onions. These are purchased, usually from Poland (which seems to have captured the EU market in onion peeling) and despatched to another factory to be defrosted, chopped into 10 millimetre dice, or sliced, frozen once more, then re-supplied ready for use, wrapped in a plastic sleeve inside cardboard boxes. You’ll never see a bulb or clove of garlic in a food manufacturing factory either, as it is commonly sourced (sometimes from Europe, usually from China) pre-chopped and frozen, or in a processed purée form.
Potatoes – now there’s another labour-intensive vegetable – similarly arrive at the factory frozen and pre-sliced to a specified thickness, or cut into neat 20 millimetre cubes. While chefs and home cooks routinely stump up for fresh leafy herbs, appreciating the fragrance and vitality they bring to a dish, food manufacturers like a shortcut. A stroll through the food manufacturer’s ‘fridge’ will show you boxes of frozen ones, pre-chopped by some other food processor in a distant factory. And guess what, they are nothing like the fresh equivalent. So why use them? ‘Frozen herbs have a better kick, or flavour profile’, one manufacturing executive told me, but no self-respecting chef or home cook would put up with the ready-to-use herbs (from Germany) that I saw. They looked grey-green and even the coriander had none of the fragrance that this herb so reliably brings to a dish; in fact, it smelt of nothing. But food manufacturers like prepped ingredients like these because, from their point of view, buying in prepared ingredients is actually ultra-responsible because they come from factories specially geared up to handle them, where the skills needed, and the risks posed, are quite different from those in their own process.
Food manufacturers apply the same logic to cooking fruits and vegetables. Why would they bother with time-consuming, laborious preparation, after all, when they can buy them in frozen and ready to use? They only need to place an order, and pallet-loads of pre-fried or grilled aubergines, peppers and courgettes, sliced to the ideal dimensions for your roasted Mediterranean vegetable pizza, will be delivered to the loading bay. Why would they muck around setting up a factory line for the scratch preparation of fresh aromatics for your Thai curry when they can source ginger already sliced into julienne strips, lime leaves already ‘milled’ into specks, and ‘nuggets’ of pulped chilli – all frozen? In food manufacturing terms, it is economic lunacy to pay someone in the UK to remove the zest from real fruits for a cheesecake, when you can buy in frozen lemon, orange and lime zest that has been mechanically removed, in a dedicated citrus processing plant, in another country. But this remorseless logic also helps explain why the resulting pizza, curry and cheesecake retain only a faint, blurry memory of the freshly prepared equivalent. These pre-processed labour-saving ingredients are simply not fresh, and storage has robbed them of their initial sparkle.
In the food manufacturer’s ingredient store, you get a further insight into why processed convenience foods don’t taste convincingly like their home-cooked equivalent. In the same way that you will never see a stray onion skin lying around a ready meals factory, you’re extremely unlikely to see an eggshell either. Eggs are supplied to food manufacturers in many forms, but almost never in their original packaging. Instead, they come in powders, with added sugar, for instance, or as albumen-only special ‘high gel’ products for whipping. Liquid eggs will be pasteurised, yolk only, whites only, frozen or chilled, or with ‘extended shelf life’ (one month), whatever is easiest. They may be liquid, concentrated, dried, crystallised, frozen, quick frozen or coagulated. Manufacturers can also buy in handy pre-cooked, ready-shelled eggs for manufacturing products like Scotch eggs and egg mayonnaise, or eggs pre-formed into 300-gram cylinders or tubes, so that each egg slice is identical and there are no rounded ends. These hardboiled, tubular eggs are snapped up by companies that make sandwiches. Manufacturers can also take their pick from bespoke egg mixes, ready to use in everything from quiches and croissants to glossy golden pastry glazes and voluminous meringues. And there is always the cheaper option of using ‘egg replacers’ made from fractionated whey proteins (from milk). No hurry to use them up either; they have a shelf-life of 18 months.
Some ingredients used by food manufacturers are recognisable to home cooks: products such as aseptic tomato paste, a cooked tomato liquid, aren’t so different from cartons of passata you might keep at home, for example. True, they come in shuddering foil packs with the dimensions of a clothes dryer in a launderette, yet the contents aren’t dissimilar. But alongside these scaled-up items is a collection of ingredients that you won’t find in any domestic larder. Instead, you’ll find products designed for particular factory purposes. If, for instance, you needed to make a batter at home, you would most likely start with flour and eggs, but manufacturers turn to ready-to-mix batters, or ‘reliable coating systems’ as they are known in the trade, specially formulated to produce identikit results in factory-scale production; everything from ‘pre-dusts’ and ‘adhesion batters’ to fritter mixes with a ‘cake-like interface’ and ‘ovenable systems’ designed for reheating in the microwave.
Why not just mix a fresh batter from scratch? As one supplier of batters explains:
Meats, poultry, vegetables and other organic substrates can vary widely in moisture level, fat and protein content. The degree of denaturisation, surface irregularities and variations in the expansion and type of protein may also come into play. The appropriate batters can help offset the effects of processing variables such as line speed, age and brand of processing machinery, water quality, set-up time, the method of reconstitution used and the amount of breading pick-up.
Strip away the characteristically industrial language of food manufacturing here, and what this means is that whether you are talking about the batter on your haddock goujons, chicken dippers or onion rings, a pre-mix guarantees uniform results, day in, day out.
Where a home cook would use breadcrumbs, manufacturers use lots of specially devised breadcrumb-like products, a necessary component of many ready meals and other convenience foods, everything from the crunchy topping on your cauliflower cheese meal-for-one through fish fingers to chicken Kievs. Indeed, they have their pick of a whole range of breadcrumb-like coatings that come in a variety of hues (due to natural or artificial colours), with different textures (from light and crispy to hard and crunchy), and in different crumb sizes. No need ever to bother with a loaf of bread.
Rather than making potato gnocchi from freshly boiled potatoes, flour and egg, the way your Italian nonna used to do (what a hassle!), food manufacturers can just add an egg and water solution to a tub of pre-seasoned, roller-dried potato flakes, designed especially for this purpose, in a mix that already contains added emulsifiers, stabilisers, citric acid, antioxidants – all to oil the wheels of the industrial process – and carrot extract, the latter to give the beige-grey dough a more wholesome colour.
Of course, any well-stocked home cook’s kitchen has a store cupboard of ingredients that add additional flavour dimensions to food. Salt and pepper, naturally, and then things like soy sauce, spices, sesame oil, mustard and vinegar, but manufacturers can call on a number of shortcut ingredients, available only to the trade, to do the job. You will see the odd tub of ground
spices in the ready meals factory, but in food processing, few ingredients are that simple. Instead there are glazes, seasoning mixes, coaters, rubs and marinades. To an optimist, these might sound quite normal, but they are far from it. They are what’s called in the business ‘flavour technology systems’ or ‘flavour delivery systems’: products specially formulated to encapsulate the aroma and taste of natural food in a handy, ready-to-use form, either dry, or in liquid form as part of a ‘liquid flavour system’.
From a food manufacturer’s perspective, why mix together several different seasonings, aromatics and condiments when you can buy one customised product that will give your basic ingredients exactly the twist you want? Barbecue glazes, for instance, come Cajun, honey roast, smoky, hot and spicy, or Deep South-style. Pre-cooked, water-injected, defrosted chicken can be ‘marinated’ or ‘rubbed’ with a whole list of them – Chinese, Moroccan, Tandoori, Thai, Mexican, Italian, Creole and more – to imbue the same bland meat with a veritable United Nations of food manufacturing personality.