Suffolk’s Birds Eye employs more than 500 staff at its factory in Lowestoft, making up a significant proportion of the total workforce, who put frozen fish, vegetables, burgers, and ready meals on millions of dinner tables all over the nation.
When it comes to its peas, the company has worked out a tight system for growing, picking, freezing and packaging as many as two billion 80g bags a year - an astonishing 750,000 bags every week.
On this week's episode of ITV4's Made in Britain, a show celebrating British manufacturing, from the mass-produced to the hand-crafted, cameras will go behind the scenes at the firm to show how the products are grown and harvested.
The show reveals there is only a 12-hour window to harvest the peas in order to "capture the sweetness and texture that makes Birds Eye famous for its peas the world over".
In that narrow time frame, the company picks and freezes an entire field of peas in Hull, packing an astonishing one to three tonnes, or three million individual peas, into lorries, which then race to Lowestoft.
