A potted tour of yoghurt factory

Almost three quarters of UK households eat yoghurt made in Shropshire. Ben Bentley visits the dairy.

Andrew Chetwood would seem to have the best job in the world. Every 20 minutes he cracks open a yoghurt, gives it a little stir and pops a dollop on the tip of his tongue.

"Just right," he says after a few seconds, nodding his approval.

Andrew is a taste tester at the Muller Dairy in Market Drayton. Or at least that's part of his job.

He is one of an 800-strong workforce who toil around the clock, enabling the rest of the nation to lick the lid of life.

Time was when eating a yoghurt was an act performed out of guilt. Or at least under threat from your mum who had a jar of cod liver oil and malt in the other hand, threatening: "It's either/or, sonny . . ."

But in today's more health-conscious times and having watched the dairy's hugely successful TV commercial with its wobbly cows and even wobblier children wobbling around glorious bits of Shropshire countryside to that jerky tune, we are voting with our mouths.

Almost three-quarters of UK households – 18 million of them – purchased Muller goods in the last year and 45 Muller products are sold per second. A good job the dairy has a filling capacity of two billion pots per year.

If Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was made in today's body-watching age it would be set here at the 53-acre Muller Dairy site. If it looks big from the outside, stepping inside you quickly feel like an ant inside a sewing machine.

Those concerned with food provenance will be happy to learn that between 5,000 and 7,000 litres of locally produced milk fresh from the teats of Shropshire finest cows every day is stored in huge vats ready to be made into yoghurt within 24 hours.

Currently there are two production plants working 24 hours a day, all year round, to turn farmers' raw dairy produce into the branded product we see on our supermarket shelves.

We start our tour in the corner yoghurts section of the dairy's Production One hall, which has the capacity to crank up to a staggering 200,000 pots an hour.

Production is in full swing, with yoghurt piped in through what must be miles of pipework. Fully automated, robot arms bob up and down dropping yoghurt and fruit into preformed pots which race away down conveyor tracks as though they are in a game of yoghurt Scalextric.

More than 20 different products are made here, and in the Production Two hall Muller Lights are in full swing. Here 80,000 pots of Muller Light are produced every hour. Muller Light - the old stalwart with a new face - remains hugely popular. Especially after Christmas.

Technical assistant Tim Beckett explains: "We produce more Muller Lights just after Christmas as people don't want to put weight on, or a are trying to lose weight, whereas fruit corners are more popular in summer."

If there's a sweet smell in the air over Market Drayton, don't assume its the whiff of success.

Today it's cherries from Turkey. We are in the fruit section, a whole hall devoted to preparing and cooking more than 50 varieties ready to be potted up. Here 53,000 tonnes of fruit is used up every year – around 1,000 tonnes of the stuff a week.

Where possible this little lot too is sourced locally, but as Tim says: "You don't get mango in Shropshire!"

One member of staff says: "When you come in to work in the morning you can sometimes smell what they are cooking – the smell of banana or strawberry."

The fruit is mixed and prepared in what looks like the biggest Kenwood Chef in the world before being pumped into storage silos – 22 12-tonne vessels, six 20-tonners and five 40 tonners, all of which is ready to feed back into the dairy's production machines.

With a dairy workforce of 800 and 600 more working at the adjoining Culina Logistics, the transport distribution arm of the operation which takes Shropshire dairy products to all corners of the UK, it is production on a grand scale.

At the same time the dairy prides itself on using local produce. You'll have seen the advert of a Friesian cow whose black and white spots spell out the fact that 90 per cent of all milk used is sourced within a 30-mile radius of the dairy.

Steve Cox is one of more than 190 farmers who supply Muller, and fits the local food ethos being just 18 miles down the road at Manor Farm, Church Eaton. His dairy herd consists of 350 cows to whom he couldn't be more dedicated.

"My wife says that if she could moo she would get more attention," Steve jokes.

His commitment pays back by the churnload. More than three million litres of milk is supplied to Muller from his farm alone.

He says of his paymasters: "They are quite a tough dairy because their standards are so high. They are concerned about cow comfort and they are the first dairy to be dedicated to reducing the carbon footprint.

"But they are also very fair and rather than jump down your throat if something goes wrong they help you out. They cannot pay more than other dairies but they are understanding of the job and they care."

And the security of supplying such a massive dairy means Steve is able to invest in new equipment for the future, such as a new rotary milking parlour, and also with his son and daughter now also farming alongside him there are plans to expand the farm with an extra 200 acres.

Is Steve a yogurt man, though? "To be honest, I didn't like yoghurts until I started with Muller," he explains. "But I tried them and now I love them."

The lid of life – like the rest of us, he's got it licked.nextpage

Fruit for fruit yoghurts

Inside the Muller factory

Technical operator Andrew Chetwood tests a batch