What Britain Buys And Sells In A Day

Ed is at London Gateway to see how the fruit and veg that we love travels across the globe but arrives on our shelves in tip-top condition. From trying his hand at being a truck driver to investigating how apples are starved of oxygen to keep them fresh, he reveals all the tricks of the fruit and veg import export trade. Ade travels the world looking at how Britain’s changing tastes for fruit and veg are impacting farmers everywhere. He visits Peru to see how Britain’s obsession with healthy eating has created a booming economy for avocado farmers. Next, he visits a business in the Netherlands which is home to 11,000 acres of greenhouses to produce almost 400,000 tonnes of tomatoes every year– much of it bound for the UK. He then heads to one of the largest grape growing regions in Spain to see how producers grow sweet and crunchy grapes to satisfy British tastes. Cherry meets British producers to see what and how we export to some surprising places. She speaks to a Cambridgeshire potato farmer who is selling spuds to the Irish and a sparkling wine producer whose product is being snapped up all over the world.

Seafood - a commodity the UK buys and sells in huge quantities. Surprisingly, the fish caught off British shores is largely dispatched abroad as exports, whereas the fish we eat here tends to be imported. Ed is at Heathrow Airport, a crucial link in Britain's seafood supply chain. He sees how crates of seafood are transported beneath the feet of long-haul passengers, in cargo holds... And how this dual purposing of flights allows the Scottish salmon industry to export nearly a quarter of a billion pounds worth of salmon a year to far flung places like the USA and China. Ed also goes behind the scenes of the airport operations centre to witness how delays can affect Britain’s seafood supply chain. Cherry is in the Scottish Highlands to uncover why the world is so fond of salmon farmed in its beautiful landscape and Ade travels to Iceland to catch one of Britain’s favourite fish - cod.

Ed is in Southampton at one of Britain’s largest ports to see our biggest export market - Cars. The industry employs over 850’000 people, more than the populations of Glasgow or Manchester, meaning no other product has a bigger direct impact on our economy. This highly collaborative, global business relies entirely on international trade and that means huge flows in and out of our country every day, and Ed wants to find out how that works. Cherry is at a car plant located firmly in Britain’s manufacturing heartland up North to explore the manufacturing technique called Just-In-Time which see’s many parts arriving into Britain on a daily basis. Ade is discovering how our spending power is currently helping prop up the world’s supercar companies.