Crisps for a good cause

Looking back on 2018, one of the biggest highlights of the year had to be our team tour of the Kettle Chips factory, just a short drive from The User Story HQ in Norwich.

Kettle Chips, who has just celebrated its 30th birthday, is a big business hero here in Eastern England. It’s one of UK’s most popular snack brands, famed for its extra crunchy crisps and great flavours, which range from classics like Sea Salt and Balsamic Vinegar to experimental combinations like the limited edition Champagne and Truffle flavour that was released for Christmas.

This exciting chance for us to enter crisp nirvana and take a look behind the scenes at Kettle came about after we supported a fundraising drive for another great local business — The Feed.

As a social enterprise, The Feed helps those who’ve experienced homelessness to access long term housing, training and employment by reinvesting 100% profits from its catering business and cafe.

Kettle Chips has been working in partnership with The Feed for over a year now, to raise awareness of the charity’s valuable work and really make a difference locally. One of Kettle’s newer flavours, Crispy Bacon and Maple Bacon directly supports The Feed, while the branded packets also help to raise awareness to a wider audience.

Heading behind the scenes

A Kettle Chip factory visit was the reward for our donation so we were all thrilled by the prospect of immersing ourselves in the world of crisps for a day, intrigued to follow the journey from harvested potatoes to packaged snacks.

It’s a very rare experience too — Kettle can’t offer regular public tours due to the protocol involved. Safety is a massive priority for this busy food factory, so we had to change into some very fetching attire… big work boots, white lab coats, blue hair nets, hard hats and ear plugs too.

There was even a delightful blue beard snood for our director Tom to give him a Smurf-like look. To his relief, we had to leave our phones in reception so could not capture any photographic evidence!

Sporting our chunky boots, we stepped into the factory proper where the freshly plucked potatoes are first tipped off the trucks and onto conveyor belts. Norfolk is where the best potatoes are grown, which is why Kettle’s founders originally chose to locate the factory here.

High-tech taters

The first thing we learn is that the potatoes can go from farm truck to bagged crisps in a mere half an hour. That speed is truly astonishing and its enabled by super-efficient technology and specialist machines.

When the potatoes arrive they are quickly sorted by going through a laser machine. It’s programmed to recognise if a potato is too green, too small or just not up to scratch. It will also detect a golf ball that may have snuck into the harvest, as that could halt the production line for a good few hours!

There were also huge cutters, which are adjusted to the size of potato in the factory that day and fryers which measure the perfect amount of sliced crisps. These adjustments allow each batch to be hand cooked to perfection and retain Kettle’s signature crunch.

Other serious bits of kit include a machine that calculates the weight to go into the packets after seasoning. It filled up to 30 pockets with the correct weight for a single bag, gradually sending them down shoots, doing hundreds of calculations every millisecond to make sure every bag is precisely filled.

Kettle have also invested in robots to improve the efficiency of packing boxes to build, fill and stack the boxes ready for delivery to hungry crisp fans across the country.

After geeking out on all the tech in the factory, we were ready for some tasty experiments in the testing kitchen headed up by Phil Hovey. Phil took over from the brand’s long-standing chef Chris Barnard when he finally hung up his chefs’ whites in 2016.

Chefs for a day

To take us through how he comes up with a new crisp combination, Phil shared his process for creating a taste profile and a journey by combining different flavours. It can take over a year to go from an initial idea to a product on the shelf with flavours going through several rounds of rigorous testing.

Phil prepared the real food version of a flavour combination so that we could compare it with the crisp version. We sampled a bite-size canape of New York Deli and Kettle’s latest limited edition flavour, Champagne and Truffle.

It was really interesting to compare the two and see how Phil had managed to capture the same flavour journey. All seasonings are derived from real food and natural flavourings and that is no easy task.

Flavours to favour

So how exactly do you go about making a champagne flavoured crisp? Well it’s a pretty delicate science as any food (or drink) you want to turn into a flavour has to be transformed into a dry powder. So you take the ingredient, make it into a liquid and then it’s sprayed into a huge cylinder. As the liquid falls, it drys into a powder which you can then use in seasonings.

Thanks to this process, you can create a vast palette of flavours to work with. So we next had the fun task of combining a selection of seasonings to make our own crisp concoctions. Phil gave us a range of powder flavours and let us go wild. We ended up with some original flavour names like ‘Chikcheeger’. Not sure they would make it to market but the crisps tasted pretty good and it was a really fun experience.

It’s all in the detail

Looking back on the experience, it was really interesting to take something you regularly consume and see how it’s made, broken down into all the granular parts of the process. The precision, care and passion that Kettle puts into making the crisps we love is amazing. We now have an even bigger appreciation for the product than before!

Further fuelling The Feed

If there was anything that came close to topping our trip to crisp heaven as the highlight of 2018, it was another outing that featured The Feed. We were proud and delighted to attend the opening launch of The Feed’s first cafe on Prince of Wales Road in Norwich last December, following that successful crowdfunding campaign which ended up raising an amazing £20,000 in total.

So in 2019 we really encourage people to help continue the good work and momentum The Feed has gathered so far. If you’re local to Norwich, use The Feed’s catering services for your next event, or visit the cafe on your coffee or lunch break. The quality is as high as you’d receive elsewhere but spending your money there means you are also supporting a very worthy cause at the same time.

And whether you are local or not, then you can really help simply by eating plenty of Kettle Chips, especially the pink packaged Crispy Bacon & Maple Syrup ones. Never has supporting a charity been so tasty with these crisps for a good cause.