Coming up on ScienceWorks!
How do you make breakfast for millions of people every day?
We'll see what it takes to run the largest oat processing plant in the world.
Plus, we've all heard how important it is to recycle.
But what is being done now to further help save the future of our planet?
But first, the perfect potato chip starts with the perfect potato.
How do you get millions of potatoes to have exactly the same delicious crunch
all across the world?
From Doritos to Cheetos to Tropicana OJ and Quaker Oats,
PepsiCo makes foods that are fun while taking nutrition seriously too.
With hundreds of food and beverage brands around the world,
the company is constantly working to improve their products,
using some pretty cool science to affect all different aspects of food production.
Let's take a look behind the scenes at one of the world's leading food and beverage companies.
[Music]
Nearly everything we eat comes from plants and animals grown and raised on a farm like this.
When I think of agriculture, I think of farmers using tractors and plows,
really getting their hands dirty.
But modern agriculture actually uses a lot of science and technology
to figure out better ways to conserve the limited resources on Earth
while feeding the ever-growing population.
[Music]
I'm here in a greenhouse on one of PepsiCo's main research farms.
This is Gabe. Gabe, what's going on behind us?
Well, this is the beginning of making great potato chips.
It all starts with one seed at the beginning.
This is where our scientists have plant and grow the seeds into plants.
Eventually they'll end up in greenhouse to produce the first few tubers.
Tubers are small potatoes that are grown from parent seeds
and then later planted to grow the actual potato.
In creating tubers, Gabe's team experiments with different combinations of parent seeds
to grow the best quality potato for chips.
Once the ideal combination has been set, the tuber retains the gene
so that identical potatoes from that lineage can be replanted each year.
Using very advanced science, we're able to follow those genes
so that we build up progressively essentially the ideal potato that we need at the end.
What we are doing is we're just helping nature,
doing what nature does in a more focused, targeted way.
So how long does it take to go from a little seed to a bag of potato chips?
Well, that's a process that can take anywhere from 5 to 15 years
to get to what you want depending on how many different characteristics
you want to bring together into that one line.
One important characteristic of the ideal potato is a natural resistance to pests and disease
in order to reduce the need for pesticides in the field.
With the evolution in plant breeding now, we have been able to select plants
that are more and more resistant by themselves using what nature makes available
so that we need to use less pesticides in those fields
in order to obtain the same quality.
So you're using science instead of chemicals to make potatoes healthier?
Absolutely. We try to make potato healthier, which also makes life easier for the growers,
quality more uniform, and at the end the consumer appear and relying on the fact
that potato chip was produced in the most sustainable way possible
based on the technology available at that point in time.
This is Tissue Culture Lab. What is this room?
Well, first of all, replace the work tissue with the ideal baby plants.
So these are all where we keep very small plants
that are always at the very young stage. It can be utilized to then generate
and create adult plants to go into our greenhouses, laboratories and fields
to eventually several years down the road create this perfect potato
that makes free-to-list potato chips so special
when the consumer opens the backs and experiences that product.
How do you keep them so young all the time?
Wouldn't they just keep growing and growing?
If you always maintain in those test tubes the part of the plant that's the young
that's reproductive that's growing and when it gets too long you cut it
and you put back the young part it always stays young.
These young plants are safely kept in the disease-free climate-controlled environment
to be easily accessed if something ever happened to ruin the crop in the field.
This allows farmers to start over if necessary with the beginning lineage
of that ideal potato plant.
We look into all of the possibilities that nature offers as in potato
and those are millions of possibilities where all the different genes
are combined in different ways and we try to find literally the one
out of millions that's going to make it to give you the product that you are used to
and that we are used to deliver to you.
Will these tiny little plants one day become potato chips in the future?
Absolutely.
These little ones will become first little to burst little potatoes
and then we'll become lots of big potatoes
and then we'll be cut to pieces and planted in the field
and those will make millions of potatoes that will get to a plant,
get sliced and sliced and packaged and shipped to you.
So tissue means baby plants, culture means grow and lab means lavatory.
Exactly, which is a fancy, very clean room where not many people get in.
Their heart has been working for PepsiCo for 25 years.
How have things changed in science and technology over the past few decades?
Oh, we've seen big changes from the technology that we use
and then also the output.
I think we've really developed unique potatoes
and better potatoes for the consumer from a chipping potato standpoint.
So big changes.
This is where it all starts.
This is a healthy seed potato.
It's a very early stage of the plant, but you can also see
that that little thing there is the start of a new potato.
When you look at these varieties, they go all over the world.
So what we do here is we're really trying to breed varieties
that will work across the world so that your experience
when you go to Europe or you go to China or Australia,
that when you open that bag, it all tastes right for you as a consumer.
You know, the right flavor, the right texture.
So how have you developed better potatoes for the consumer?
First off, we select the right patterns.
Since parents are what's grown from true potato seeds,
the characteristics of potatoes grown from them can vary greatly.
They try thousands of varieties of potatoes from the offspring of the parents
until finding the ideal chipping potato.
What they're looking for are potatoes with low sugar levels,
which ensures a chip's crisp white color.
Texture is also important to achieve the proper crunch.
And of course, the key quality is flavor.
From a flavor standpoint, if you open that bag,
you can really taste that nice flavor.
And that's probably what you will not get from regular potatoes
that you buy in a grocery store.
Seed potatoes planted in this field grow for around three months
and then are harvested.
At that point, the potatoes are taken to larger farms where they'll multiply.
About ten potatoes will grow from each of the single seed potatoes.
We process more than three billion pounds of potatoes just in the U.S.
And the U.S. is run about a third of our total consumption of potatoes,
so quite a few potatoes.
That's a lot of potatoes.
From the field, potatoes are brought here to get them ready for processing into chips.
Behind me, there are more than 20 million potatoes,
all bred to have the same consistency and highest quality
that laser choirs to make the ideal chip.
I love when science is so delicious.
Coming up, breakfast has been called the most important meal of the day.
But science plays an important role in producing breakfast for 16 million people.
We'll visit historic, Quaker Oats to see a little of what's involved
in supplying a lot of breakfasts.
This Quaker Oats facility in Cedar Rapids, Iowa
is the largest oat processing plant in the world.
Here, they produce about 13 million bowls of oatmeal per day,
plus cereals like Captain Crunch and Life and other brands.
And if that's not impressive enough, they also have a significant number of women
working in traditionally male-dominated leadership roles.
Let's take a look at how some of these women use science
to continue Quaker's 140-year history of manufacturing great breakfasts.
I'm here with Cindy, who's the plant manager here at Quaker Oats.
Cindy, plant manager sounds like a huge job.
What does that mean?
It is a huge job.
Our plant is over 140 years old.
We make all kinds of Quaker Oats products that people probably
don't even know are Quaker Oats products.
Enchamima syrup, for instance, is a Quaker Oats product.
When I think of how science relates to food, I think of maybe the product design.
But there's a lot of science that goes into manufacturing too, right?
Absolutely.
Think about just what the formula is, right?
And then you have to make that formula perfectly.
You might be at home saying, "Oh, a little bit of this, a little bit of that."
You don't do that when you are making food for somebody else.
It is, you're going to make sure you are precisely following the formula that was developed
back in research and development team.
Then just sheer equipment.
And what it takes to make sure that our equipment is completely dialed in perfectly
to deliver the exact shape of Captain Crunch that you want to see in your bowl, right?
Or those flakes that you want to see in your oatmeal.
Just the sheer science and math and technology that goes into making sure our equipment is dialed in perfectly.
I feel like just feeding myself seems like such a huge task.
How do you feed all of America with your products?
Isn't it crazy when you start to think about what we do in a day?
We make 13 million bowls of oatmeal in a day.
So from a scale perspective, we're huge.
This Cedar Rapids Quaker facility holds 22 buildings on 25 acres of land
as the world's largest oat processing plant.
It handles about one railcar of oats every single hour.
So what we're seeing right now is our iconic Panerot milk tube that has been filled with our oats
and has put a lid on it.
And it's traveling around so it's on its way to shipping department.
We put in a cave without a palletizer to get on a truck into a distribution center.
This part of the packaging floor is only one link of what is called the supply chain,
which represents the whole process of getting a product from the field to store shelves.
Science of technology is incredible what you think about what all goes into making that one tube of oatmeal.
From the oats that come from the farm through our grading process and our quality check
into the milling operation, our rolling and cutting operation to make sure that's flaked
is the exact same size every time.
Kenya Peacock is vice president of supply chain quality and uses her chemistry degree
to oversee the nearly 200 manufacturing locations in North America.
When you think about a science degree, what we do is science every day.
From the manufacturing to the simple things of, you know, how a truck runs
and how you move it to the market, how do you control temperatures environments,
there's nothing we do that is an impact science.
When you're studying these types of degrees, you know, it's not just going to be a doctor
or going to be a research scientist because what I do every day,
I use all of my education and learning in the most impactful part
is work going into the plants or going into our warehouse distributions
and everything that you learn is so science-based that you constantly apply that
and change what we do every day.
A huge part of running a plant is making sure all the equipment is running most efficiently.
One component feeds into the next with precision.
If one piece is not calibrated properly, the whole system could fail.
The reason we use a lot of science is that even just the speed of how fast these belts are moving,
that bag has to hit the box, at any all timing, it's not going to match.
And when once that happens, your whole machine is down.
And there's a huge difference in determining the workflow and process
when packaging liquid products versus dry products.
You also think about how you build products.
If you think about something that doesn't weigh very much
and a dry product and you're filling it into a container,
but then take something like syrup that has a very heavy aspect to it
when you're trying to fill it.
So understanding the types of equipment, the speed, making sure the fill levels are correct,
all of that comes into serious play in the complexity and the differences between a dry and a liquid.
Every link in the chain has to work perfectly
from ingredient purchasing to getting it here, to manufacturing it,
putting it on a truck and getting it into a warehouse.
That all has to work perfectly every link.
And then you make a delicious cereal.
And then we are Quaker-outs, that is true.
Up next, what happens to plastic bottles after they're put in the recycle bin?
We'll visit a lab that is working to improve how old used bottles become new all over again.
If I told you that this bottle of water is being redesigned to trim its size,
you'd think no big deal, right?
Well, think of the millions and millions of bottles distributed all across the world.
Reducing its size by even one millimeter could have a huge impact.
I'm here with Neil, who's a packaging designer here at PepsiCo's Research and Development Center.
Neil, what is your job here?
What me and my team do is work on the development and commercialization of the packages for PepsiCo.
The first part is how well does the package protect the product,
making sure that it gets to the consumer with the right freshness and the right flavor cues.
And another important part is when the consumer is done with it, what do they do with it?
Recycling is so important.
Absolutely.
In the United States, that's the largest infrastructure for recycling is around plastic.
And what we're really looking to do is one, how do we bolster that and how do we get recycling rates up?
But then two, how are we incorporating it back into a bottle?
So we have one bottle, its end light does not go into the trash or into waste.
What we can do is repurpose it and go back into another bottle.
When you look at this for recycling, you need to break it down into its base elements.
The closure, the bottle, and the label itself.
So many times what we look at is how can we make sure that this label is separating from the bottle when it does get the recycle stream?
The other part is the closure, making sure it actually stays with the bottle when you do recycle it.
And then when it gets to the recycling stream, it can be separated by itself.
And then third, the materials, the materials need to be able to go from one bottle in this existing life, be remelted, reused to be able to go into another bottle.
What's some of the interesting science related to recycling?
Well a lot of it is breaking this package down to its base elements.
Much of it is trying to release this label from the bottle in itself so we can get to the usable components afterwards.
Cool, can we go check it out?
Absolutely.
So this just looks like ground up plastic bottles.
That's exactly what it is.
This is a combination of PET labels and closures.
What's PET?
Polyethylene terephthalate.
Polyethylene terephthalate?
That's such a big word.
What it is is basically just ground up plastic bottles.
Absolutely.
You gather the bottles from the recycling industry and they get ground up into small pieces like this, which is considered PET flake.
Yeah, they're so little.
Right, so it's a combination of the bottle itself, the labels, the caps, what have you.
Cool, so once you have these ground up plastic bottles, you then put them in water?
Correct, so what happens is when it gets into the recycling stream, it goes into what's called a sink floke bath.
So PET or the plastic bottles have a specific gravity that's greater than one.
If you have the correct designed label, you have a specific gravity less than one so therefore it's going to float.
Can I put it in?
Absolutely.
Cool.
Here's a good example of what happens after the process.
You'll see much of the material on the bottom.
That's the good PET that we want and then much of material on the top is the labels that have separated.
I see that some of the labels have floated but some haven't.
What's going on there?
So what we have here is a cross-section of the industry.
So this just isn't Pepsi bottles, it's a combination of multiple different companies, different formats for that.
So that's why it's important that everyone is involved in the sustainability effort.
I guess it makes sense because when you recycle, you don't go like, "Oh, here's a Pepsi bottle.
Here's a different bottle."
They kind of all just get merged together.
I mean, that's what we want to take that out of the consumer's mind.
They shouldn't have to think about it.
They should be comfortable with taking their bottle and putting it in the recycle stream.
Once you have the labels on the top and the PET on the bottom, what's the next step?
So basically what happens from there is it'll skim the beds material off the top and the good PET will be put into another process
where we will remelt it, purify it, and then it can turn back into another bottle.
So that's the ultimate goal then to use the recycled plastic as a new plastic.
Exactly.
Still ahead, we'll find out how new technologies may one day allow for smaller landfills and cleaner oceans.
But it all starts with recycling.
We talked about the design of recycling.
Now let's go through the recycling process.
I'm here with Meghan, the Global Sustainability Director here at PepsiCo.
Meghan, that's a really cool title.
Can you go through the process of recycling for me?
I'd love to.
Most consumers don't really think about what happens to their bottle or can after they enjoy their great beverage.
Hopefully what they do is they recycle.
If they recycle, those bottles and cans can actually have more lives.
And what I mean by that is they can go through the recycling process and become new bottles and cans.
We saw earlier this sink and float process.
That was separating these PET flakes from the labels.
These are clean flakes.
So these flakes have gone through another step where they're washed through a caustic washing system and are clear now.
What happens next is these flakes are turned into recycled plastic pellets.
So you can kind of see they're just little pellets.
So what are these pellets used for?
Those pellets are then melted down and formed into what's called a preform.
And this is really the beginning of the bottle coming to life.
So then this goes into a process where this preform plastic is heated, stretched, and then blown into the shape of a bottle, such as this bottle.
So you're telling me this is going to become a bottle?
Exactly.
In fact, that preform makes this bottle. So this bottle then turns into a bottle made 100% recycled plastic.
What are some other new exciting technologies for sustainability?
One a really excited one, and we're still working on this, we're looking at new materials that are rapidly renewable and biodegradable.
And biodegradable in a lot of different scenarios, including marine biodegradable.
Marine biodegradable means that packaging would actually dissolve in water, going back to base elements that have no negative environmental impact.
We don't want anything ending up in the ocean, but if something does end up in the ocean, we'd rather it dissolve naturally versus create an issue.
As Megan's team continues to develop cutting-edge new materials for future packaging, the big focus today is to encourage recycling.
In the U.S., only about one out of four bottles are recycled. So if we can encourage consumers to recycle more, we can put more of this recycled plastic into our bottles.
I think the important thing to remember is there's so much as part of this, but the consumers are the most important, so we need them to recycle.
And we as PepsiCo are working to try and get them to recycle more.
Guys, everyone recycle, right?
Indeed. Everyone recycle.
Everyone recycle. You need to recycle.
I'd like to thank the folks here at PepsiCo for taking the time to show us how science can make the world a more sustainable and delicious place.