Classic food

Have a break

Candida Crewe

ONE CANNOT write about the staple foods of the English without including the bar of chocolate. But which particular bar? I longed to see whether my childhood dreams of chocolate factories tied in with the reality of the Mars Bar production line. However, Mars have a frustrating no-visi- tors policy, so we shall never know for sure. Nestle Rowntree, on the other hand, are more welcoming; and anyway, the Mars Bar is simply not as big in sales terms as their Kit Kat.

This allows Nestle Rowntree to become quite grand about their little bar. 'Nix is quite close to us,' said Kit Kat's marketing head, 'but its trouble is it's got no image. We've been around since 1937, and every- body associates having a break with having a Kit Kat.'

The basic product has never changed, not even when it changed its name, two years after its birth, from the less catchy Choco- late Crisp. In the war, it was, briefly, made with dark chocolate because of milk short- ages (and came in a blue wrapper). In 1947, though, the full cream version was back. Because plain chocolate constitutes only 1 per cent of the whole chocolate market in this country, the manufacturers have never bothered to reintroduce it.

`Unlike the Mars Bar, ours is a light eat, not a heavy eat at all,' the marketing man went on. 'Mars is meant to replace energy. Kit Kat isn't positioned to do that at all. It's more for general use, as a reward to your- self, a break from routine. Our sales have gone up 9 per cent in the recession.'

The two-finger Kit Kat is another story. Its competitor is the Penguin biscuit. Cad- bury's recently launched the Time Out, the bar which currently most resembles the Kit Kat. 'It'll do OK,' Kit Kat's marketing head said, 'but you see our rivals come, and you see them go.' Combine Kit Kat's two sizes and — with UK sales alone at £190 million in 1991 — it is the single biggest confec- tionery brand in the country. (The entire market for white chocolate — Milky Bar, Dairy Crunch, white Toblerone et of — is only £39 million.)

NR produce most of their 35 million Kit Kats a year from a rather wonderful 100- year-old red brick building in York. I made a trip there on a sunny day, blossoms out. When I arrived at reception, I heard a woman direct someone to the 'Smartie Corridor'. (Smarties, and many other prod- ucts including Polos, Aeros, Dairy Boxes and Match Makers, are all manufactured at the York factory, which is just one of the nine confectionery plants owned by NR in the UK.) This long corridor, with a name that seemed too good to be true, led to 'Kit Kat 4' (the home of the four-finger bars — the two-finger ones are produced in the same way, but elsewhere). The corridor had a fit- tingly old-fashioned feel, with its cream brick walls, its floor of worn metal tiles. At Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, in the book by Dahl that sparked a million fan- tasies about chocolate making, there was a door marked 'The Chocolate Room'; at Nestle Rowntree there were doors marked `Moulded Chocolate' and 'Cream Depart- ment'. And the smell everywhere was like that of hot chocolate sauce being made for vanilla ice-cream. It was party-time for the nostrils.

`Kit Kat 4' itself comprises three rooms, each not much smaller than a football pitch. They house an operation which has to produce 80,000 bars an hour, 24 hours a day, six days a week., to fulfil the annual demand of 40,000 tonnes, or three and a half billion individual fingers (one for every person on the planet).

The wafer is made first, in a batter-mak- ing system. The flour is sifted in a machine which pulsates like the Orgasmatron in

SUMMER FOOD AND DRINK

Woody Allen's Sleeper. Water, sugar, salt, and butter are automatically measured and metered in, but you can't see this process because it goes on behind the shiny com- plexions of the machines. The ingredients are squirted into a high-speed mixer and end up in a metal tank, looking like bubbly vanilla milkshake. Other open vats, con- taining the praline filling, stand nearby. This pale, gooey nectar is made of sugar, pure chocolate and any crumbled (reject) wafers (to give it its gritty quality).

The batter and praline are separately pumped via high-rise pipes to the row upon row of outsize baking ovens 30 yards away. These reminded me of washing-machines in a launderette, but they gave off a better smell — that of white toast about to burn.

Batter is squeezed, toothpaste-like, onto metal plates inside the ovens which clamp together to squash, level out and cook the mixture — the sandwich-maker principle. Two minutes later, large square leaves of wafer emerge and are individually stacked onto a moving arch of shelves. At this stage the wafers could be mistaken for cards dis- played in an art materials shop — not notably appetising.

Reaching a conveyor belt, praline is dripped onto and levelled over the surface of two out of every three of the 'cards'.

They then pass through a mangle and are collated for each to form a five-layered mattress of wafer, praline, wafer, praline, wafer. These are cooled — so the praline can set — and every one is cut into 18 `books' (each 'book' eventually makes for seven finished 'fingers').

A robot (there is a marked lack of per- sonnel in Kit Kat 4, the odd man in a white coat here, or woman in a surgeon's cap there, overseeing operations) stacks these onto trays and crates. They are taken in fork-lift trucks to a vast temperature-con- trolled store-room to recover for nine days, and crisp up their act. The wafers wouldn't be soggy, exactly, if they didn't have this lit- tle break before the next stage but, crispi- ness-wise, there would be a noticeable dif- ference.

In the next room the wafers teamed up with their cocoa coating. This had already been made elsewhere and was a process I wasn't allowed to see. Even the hospitable folk at NR are a bit shy about letting peo- ple witness this, the chocolate being such a crucial part of their product. Still, the nos- trils got down to some serious raving any- way, smelling it at this more developed stage. So did the taste-buds start to dance at the sight of the thick rolls of brown goo lazily flopping like waves over the moving carpet of finger moulds. This was more like Wonka country.

At another point in the production line, `books' were being cut into fingers. Neat

rows were then being sent on their way to be dropped with amazing precision onto the chocolate, which had been levelled into the bottom of the shallow moulds. As the fingers progressed towards the final robing of chocolate (to cover their backs), any of those straying from their little coffins were either straightened out or rejected by the diligent, fleshy fingers of two white-coated women.

The chocolate having quickly contracted and hardened in a cooler, the finished bars emerged in long wide lines on a shiny white rubber conveyor belt, the familiar Kit Kat logo firmly imprinted on them. At this point, before being separated and wrapped, they looked like piano key-boards.

`They're at their absolute best now,' my guide informed me, 'because they're still so cool, better even than when you buy them in the shops a month from now.'

Moments later, I saw thousands of Kit Kats, now decked out in their neat red and white lively, speeding like cars round a Scalextric track towards their multi-boxes. Their use-by date read an amazing nine months hence, so if I eat a Kit Kat in March 1993, I'll know I may have been there at its conception.