Nestlé is shining a spotlight on its Dalston factory in Cumbria – the home of its Nescafé Frothy Coffee products – and its Nestlé Waters & Premium Beverages bottling site in Buxton, in the latest episodes of its Amazing Machines YouTube series, as it approaches its final chapters and continues to open the doors on modern British manufacturing.
The series comes at a time when new research shows a growing visibility gap around manufacturing careers. While 59% of young people say manufacturing sounds interesting, just 4% would consider a career in the sector, with many believing manufacturing has moved overseas or operates largely out of sight.
With social media now the biggest influence on career ideas for a third of young people, the series helps make the machines, skills and people behind everyday products more visible – opening up careers in one of Britain’s most important industries to future talent.
The machine generating 60,000 Nescafé Frothy Coffee sachets an hour
At Nestlé’s Dalston factory, presenter and engineer Ruth Amos steps onto the floor of one of the fastest packaging lines on site, meeting the teams behind a machine built for speed and precision.
The bespoke UP One line produces up to 60,000 cappuccino sachets every hour, packing more than 25 million Nescafé sachets each week.
The process starts on site, where raw milk is dried into milk powder, blended in Dalston’s dry mix tower and fed straight into the packaging line. In a tightly choreographed sequence, finished sachets move from bags to pallets in under three minutes, entirely by machine.
At such speeds, the human eye can’t keep up. High-speed cameras slow the action down frame by frame to spot issues before they escalate, while robotic arms pack boxes and move finished pallets through to the warehouse ensuring that when consumers open a box at home, they’re the first people to touch their sachets.
The production line making more than 40,000 bottles of water an hour
Situated in the picturesque town of Buxton in the Peak District, Derbyshire, Nestlé Waters & Premium Beverage’s state-of-the-art factory quietly sets out to help quench the nation’s thirst, bottling Buxton natural mineral water.
Amos’s visit unveils the full journey each bottle takes, starting with blowing the preforms – that are made with 100% recycled PET and are recyclable – into their desired shape. With an astonishing speed of 11 bottles per second, they are then filled with water sourced from a protected underground source before caps are applied to the correct torque and labels are attached.
High-speed cameras check everything is fully secured and in the right position so that three seamlessly-orchestrated robots can then work together to palletise the products prior to heading off for storage and distribution. The on-site cutting-edge storage centre can hold an impressive 30,000 pallets of products before they are distributed to customers across the country.
The site in Buxton also bottles Nestlé Pure Life spring water and helps deliver products such as Acqua Panna and S.Pellegrino waters to consumers in the UK.
The skills behind the machines
Alongside the machinery itself, the final episodes of Amazing Machines spotlight the skilled teams who design, run and maintain the technology behind Nestlé’s UK operations.
In Dalston, viewers meet Olivia Tomlinson, a degree-level packaging apprentice working on innovation and sustainability, and Heather Pieri, Operational Start-Up Lead for the high-speed UP One line, helping bring one of the fastest systems on site online.
And at Nestlé’s bottling site in Buxton, we meet engineering graduates Sam Hartley and Emma Robinson, who highlight what it takes to keep the site’s filling processes and storage facilities ticking, while Shift Engineer and former engineering apprentice, Katie Brown, illustrates how each step of the bottling and labelling processes are carefully co-ordinated to minimise downtime.
Their roles reflect the range of engineering and operational expertise needed to keep advanced automation running smoothly and the creativity and problem-solving behind every amazing machine at Nestlé.
Martin Krohn, head of technical and production at Nestlé UK and Ireland, said: “The final videos in our Amazing Machines series have given people a unique glimpse into the vital role that cutting-edge engineering, advanced technology and talented teams play in producing brands that Britain loves.
“As our research has highlighted, whilst young people are curious about manufacturing, many don’t see it as a career option, which makes visibility like this more important than ever.
“Behind every machine are passionate, skilled people who develop and run this technology, and we’re committed to investing in our operations and workforce to create more opportunities for the next generation in this vital British industry.”
The Dalston and Buxton films conclude Nestlé’s four-part Amazing Machines series, which explores the machines and people behind some of the company’s most important UK operations.
