Engineering a meatball

I was in Swindon, home of the BMW Mini and Honda auto plants, and more importantly, home to Multivac UK, equipment makers of thermoforming packaging machines. These are the packages that look so like non-packaging, you think the sliced cheese inside the tray will fall out if you turn it over. But no, it’s sealed right in.

It does go to show how engineering is engineering – the resulting product has to be made correctly, if it’s a sealed tray or a car. People often don’t consider food manufacturing to be an engineering job, but the packaging of yogurts, cheese and one’s morning Actimel all requires a fair bit of maths and science to produce the package and then to fill it quickly and efficiently.

At any rate, the good people of Multivac showed us around their newly refurbished building, complete with offices and desks I could never use. The piles of paper on mine would ruin any aesthetic lines the architects were trying to achieve. It was like visiting a show home. I so want to live here and have this neat desk! Why am I not tidier? I quieted my recriminatory mind by eating a lot of the free sweets that were on the tables. It helped.

Never mind. We went into the product development lab and watched meatballs being made, then burgers. It is merely the application of pressure that makes a meatball a burger, I discovered.

It is good to see that the dairy industry and its suppliers are keen to upgrade and improve here in the UK. I think it is a testament to the positive business feeling that manufacturers from other countries get when they look at the workforce here. A machine is a machine, and there should be more work done to let students know that their science and engineering degrees can be usefully employed in the food and dairy industry.