Inside a Factory that Perfectly Strips Sweetcorn | Food Unwrapped

Next up, sweetcorn. Getting corn off the cob is pretty tricky. You don't want to take any of the white bits or damage the kernels. When you buy them in a tin, they all look exactly the same. How? Over to you, Kate. To find out, I'm heading to the southwest of France, home to the largest sweetcorn processing plant in the world. Benoit? Hi. Kate. Kate, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. Welcome to Serret Farm. Benoit runs the biggest tin sweetcorn factory in the world. I reckon that makes him the corn colonel. Look at all that sweetcorn. It's a little bit like if you've ever been to an arcade and you put your money in those coin machines. But you never win. Yeah. We've just won loads of sweetcorn. How many of these cobs do you receive every day at this time of year? If you have some time, you can count them. I don't know. Roughly 2,000 tonnes. 2,000 tonnes a day? A day, yeah. A day? The number of pieces, I don't know. Sadly, there's no time for a cob count. This corn needs to be canned. Too sweet. First, the corn goes through a machine that removes the leaves and husks. The crop picked this morning will be in tins within eight hours. Amazing. But how do they get their corn off the cob? Wow! Anouaz agreed to show me these knives in close-up, somewhere a bit quieter. This is a cutting head. And are those blades? Yeah. So you've got six extraordinarily sharp blades set, well, pretty much around a circle. Yeah. And so then the cob goes in. On the machine, it is rotating. Sweet corn comes in. Just like this? But at high speed. High speed, yeah. But cobs come in all shapes and sizes. So how can they be sure they're not damaging the kernels or taking off the white bits? How does it adjust to the different sizes of sweet corn? It's still part of our secret. Does this adjust in size? Yeah. Can you show me? Basically, this way. But we have specific program to take care of the knives, adjusting the settings that we won't share with you. Is that a trade secret? It's a secret. So the machine consists of spinning knives that strip the kernels from over 7,000 cobs an hour. And the knives constantly adjust to fit the exact size of every one of those cobs. This is one sharp operation. Who would have thought that all of that novelty and that little...