MILLIONS OF BISCUITS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 August 1940, Page 8

MILLIONS OF BISCUITS

BRITAIN'S WAR-TIME PLANTS. The capacity and resilience of Britain’s non-armament engineering industries is strikingly instanced by the wartime activities of one of the world's largest makers of bread and biscuit machinery.

Maintaining their overseas business in spite of the war, they have already shipped big modern biscuit manufacturing plants to Canada, Australia and South Africa; and a very big order has come from Chile, a country which formerly gave most of its engineering custom to Germany. Of two plants ordered from Chile, one has already arrived there.

Biscuit manufacture has become so automatic that dough fed into one end of the equipment emerges at the other end in the form of the finished product, stacked ready for packing and untouched by human hands. Ovens are often 200 feet long, heated by as many as 150 gas or oil burners, or electric elements. Often as many as eight plants operate side by side, producing 1,920 biscuits a minute or 44,600,000 in. a 48-hour week. Many plants are capable of rapid adjustment for producing Army biscuits and the machinery will stand up to the strain of trebling its normal output in emergen-, cies.

Britain is the home of the biscuit, not only in the sense that the public's taste sets a quality standard and creates “fashions” to which the rest of the world aspires, but also because British engineers have achieved supremacy in perfecting machinery to deal with the amazing increase in demand which has been a feature of the evolution of eating habits in recent years.