This time, we reveal
the relentless struggle to keep city supplied with food.
We have to deliver.
We're under a huge amount of time pressure.
From traders at Billingsgate Market
fighting for the freshest fish-
It's all a gamble.
If you get it wrong, it's gonna cost you money.
To the hidden army battling against the clock
to meet demand for online groceries.
(techno music)
The drivers go out, they come back
and we just keep me reloading them all the way through.
And, we discover how rooftop farming
could solve our city's food supply problems.
People can't believe,
there's a greenhouse in the South Bronx.
They can't believe there's veggies in the hood.
Half the world's population
live in urban areas, and the number is rising every second.
Each day is a race against time,
to house, feed, water and move more than 3.5 billion people.
It's an impossible daily challenge.
The slightest glitch can bring a city to its knees.
And every 24 hours, it has to be done all over again.
This is the story of how cities work.
Food.
Human life can't exist without it.
It's a city's most important source of energy.
In New York alone, eight million people
consume 10,000 tons of food every day.
In the city that never sleeps,
delivery rider O.J. fights a daily battle
to keep his customers supplied, with pizza.
I think people love pizza too much in New York.
That's what I think.
America eats so much pizza, that every day
the equivalent of a square kilometer is consumed.
Enough to cover the whole of Central Park
in just over three days. (siren wailing)
This pizza restaurant in New York's East Village
takes around 150 home delivery orders every day.
For restaurant manager Mark Kenyon,
there's no other city in the world
with such a love for this type of food.
You think of pizza, you think of New York.
People come from all around the country,
all around the world, to try New York's pizza,
and it's very rarely where a New Yorker
will go one week without having some sort of pizza.
There's a lot of demand
and a lot of suppliers trying to meet it.
There are 10 other pizza joints in the neighborhood
and competition is fierce. (telephone ringing)
When an order comes in, every second counts.
What are we gonna have?
Cash?
Give us about a half an hour or so?
Thank you very much.
Every morsel Mark sends out has to be perfect.
But, delivering it to customers hot and fresh
is far harder than meets the eye.
Delivery men must brave city traffic,
and New York is home to one of
the fiercest driving environments in the world.
Delivering to the city can be tough.
Delivery on bikes,
it's gonna be the fastest way to get to the city.
You don't have to sit behind any cars in traffic.
It's delivery rider O.J.'s secret weapon.
I think I move twice as fast on a cycle,
than what a car would move on the streets.
And the faster O.J.
can get food around the city the better.
I always get to the customer within 15 minutes
that I grab the pizza, and it always gets to them hot.
The quicker I am, the more money I can make in one night.
(zooming traffic)
With demand for food in the city so high,
the restaurants and supermarkets
must be restocked on a daily basis.
Without new supplies, cities will run out
of fresh food in a matter of days.
To produce enough to feed everybody,
vast swathes of countryside have been transformed
into giant agricultural factories.
This farm is located in California's Salinas Valley.
It produces nearly four million servings
of salad every single week.
To arrive on supermarket shelves in perfect condition,
the lettuce must be harvested at exactly the right moment.
Right now, Director of Supply, Chris Glynn is in a race
to save a crop of romaine lettuce from the elements.
The hardest thing to deal with out here is mother nature.
You know, we've just gone through a heat wave,
so the crop has grown faster than we expected it to.
With seven crews working the fields,
Chris needs to have over 300,000 square meters
of crop harvested today, before it begins to spoil.
To beat the heat, Chris and the harvesting team
start work at midnight, and must finish
by the time most city workers are starting their day.
We're concerned about speed and timing out here.
We wanna keep this product fresh and cool as possible.
So, if we can cut it early in the morning here
before temperatures rise, it really helps those shelf life.
This product will last a lot longer once we have it packed.
The crop is expected
to produce over 180 tons of lettuce.
From the moment the leaves are cut,
the battle to keep them crisp begins.
Temperatures are expected to reach 35 degrees.
(machinery operating)
Every moment they spend exposed to the sun,
shortens the leaves shelf life
and could mean the salad goes to waste.
In America, almost a quarter
of all homegrown food comes from California.
The state has over 100,000 square kilometers
of agricultural land, an area five times
the size of the country of Wales.
Californian farmers grow almost $1.5 billion
worth of salad every year.
Earthbound farms started 29 years ago,
on two and a half acres,
and today we are farming on roughly about,
50,000 crop acres.
It's now 7:00 AM.
The teams have harvested 130 tons
of the day's 180 ton target.
If current progress continues,
they will meet their 10:00 a.m. deadline.
To get the job done Chris and his team
require some highly specialized equipment.
(rock music)
So this is the spring mix harvester.
The front end here is what we call the tickler.
It brushes along the tops of the baby lettuce.
If there's any kind of flying insects they're lifted off.
The blade is a bandsaw type of blade.
It's stainless steel and very sharp.
It goes along the ground, makes cuts on the baby lettuce,
then it's pushed up along the machine,
where they're packed inside these blue totes,
and then brought along and put up on the trailer,
and palletized up there.
Heavy automation
is the only way to ensure cities are supplied
with enough affordable fresh food on a daily basis.
A decade or so ago, this same procedure
would have took a crew of about 40 people, by hand,
with knives on the ground, eight hours to do a whole acre.
This machine here, takes probably about 15 minutes.
It's a crew of about 10 people.
As soon as each trailer of lettuce is full,
it is transferred to a waiting cold truck
and taken off to the processing plant.
Here, every single leaf must be washed, dried and packaged.
The lettuce may be out of the heat,
but the battle to get it to the customer
in pristine condition is far from over.
Salad prepared this way doesn't last long.
It is vital, Operations Manager Will Daniels
gets the newly harvested leaves through the plant
and into the delivery trucks as fast as possible.
In order for it to be the highest quality,
it's extremely important that we harvest it, cool it,
and put it into a container as quickly as possible.
That's gonna ensure the maximum freshness for our consumer.
So as a result we work very quickly.
With over 1,000 tons
of lettuce working its way through this building each week,
everything has to run like clockwork.
So there's a great sense of urgency
to get it through that process as quickly as possible.
It's a complex task,
and the smallest glitch could bring
the whole operation to a standstill.
The first stage is mixing the leaves.
One of the big benefits about these salads
that were delivered to the consumer is that
they're not just one ingredient, but up to 10 ingredients.
As you see here we've got several ingredients
that are really nice and healthy,
and this is where the process begins
before we put it into the package.
It's possible that bits of soil,
a few roots, or the occasional insect
have been harvested with the leaves.
It's super-important that we try and take
the foreign material out of the salad.
We used to do that through visual inspection
with people on the line looking
at lettuce going by on a belt.
It was efficient, but not very effective
over long periods of time.
So we looked for technology to improve that process,
and we found these laser sorters.
Inside the laser sorter,
a beam is fired at the passing leaves.
It detects any foreign objects, and triggers a blast of air
to clear the offending debris from the production line.
If you can hear those little blasts,
those are little pockets of air
pushing product into the waste stream
and removing it from the process stream.
As well as being debris-free,
the salad must be clean.
Any germs from the fields could become a serious health risk
if they are not removed now.
Wash flumes containing a special sanitizer zigzag their way
around the plants to ensure every single leaf
heads to the next stage as clean as can be.
It's super-important that we conserve
as much water as possible in this process.
So both flumes have recirculating systems
that we're constantly monitoring with top quality control.
Next, a spin dry at 550 RPMs
in one of the site's 50 turbo veg dryers
shakes off excess water.
And then, off it goes to be portioned up into boxes.
But the pack area is the most complex part of the system,
requiring employees and machines to work together in unison.
This is the area with all this technical equipment
in line, if one piece goes down,
or if things could really back up behind us.
So you could see all of these things need to work
in accord for us to produce, you know,
the two and a half million pounds of product
that we produce in a week, five ounces at a time.
With demand so high,
the technology and use here is being pushed to the limit.
So far today, the production line is keeping pace
with the produce flowing in from the fields.
I think there is a lack of understanding
of what it takes to get produce to the consumer's plate.
There's so many steps along the way that really,
the consumer doesn't have to do,
and we're really delivering that convenience.
The final stage in the process
is getting the bags of lettuce onto the supermarket shelves.
Each day, over half a million individual salads
are shipped out from here, making their way
to local stores in cities across the country.
They can restock the closest ones in just a few hours,
but it will take up to five days
to reach those on the East Coast.
Out in the field, the harvesting team
are filling the last load of the day.
They've hit their target,
and the crop should reach grocery stores in prime condition.
Today's shift maybe almost over,
but the crew will be back to do the same again tomorrow.
On this farm, they harvest lettuce over 300 days per year.
A speedy harvest isn't the only trick
Chris and his team developed,
to ensure city supermarkets stay fully stocked.
When the team cut the leaves,
they leave the plant roots in the ground.
We try to manage nature as far as we can.
From seed up to full size,
takes about 26 days.
Once we've cut it here,
we can clean this bed top up
and regrow this lettuce again,
and it'll only take about two weeks.
This can double the amount
of lettuce each field produces.
Yields have increased over the years.
We're increasing our knowledge out here in the field,
and with that increasing the efficiencies
of our farming operations.
Improving crop yields
is crucial to sustaining cities in America,
and all across the world.
(techno music)
As urban populations rise,
farms will face increasing pressure
to produce more and more food.
And not just salad.
To stay healthy, humans need protein.
Each day, beef, chicken, pork, and lamb must be shipped
into cities across the planet.
But one of the most perishable protein foods is fish.
(upbeat music)
Coming to life at 2:00 a.m. each morning,
Billingsgate Market supplies fresh fish to London.
Almost a hundred tons pass through this market each day,
headed for the capitol's shops, restaurants and hotels.
It comes in from all corners of the world and lands here,
at the market's delivery bay.
It's Foreman Nick Henley's job to ensure
each delivery makes its final 100 meter journey
from the bay to the trader stalls on the busy market floor.
Our fish is just arriving now,
so we're checking it all off.
It comes off here.
Despite so much cargo arriving,
this morning's deliveries appear to be going smoothly.
But trade at Billingsgate Market
depends on fish arriving on time.
Like any cargo its journey can sometimes
be hampered by delays on route.
There is an awful lot of shouting
and screaming in this job.
When it comes in late, you will get the fish
arriving after the market's started,
and the tenants are screaming for the fish.
So it's a rush to get it out, as soon as it gets here.
I worked three and a half years
actually on the market floor.
So, I do understand the need to get it in.
The fish on Merchant Steve Clement's stall
comes from all over the world.
Here I might find 65 of bourgeois, two pieces of sword,
and these are, a fresh delivery of fish
that we've had coming from our seashores today.
They're called a bourgeois snapper,
and what a lovely looking fish.
Caught by a hook and line method by a very small boat,
probably one of the best 18 snappers that you've ever seen.
As you can tell, probably one of the best looking as well.
Look at these little beauties.
Filet snapper flown all the way in from Mexico.
We've got anything from a wahoo kingfish there,
from Suriname in Latin America,
we've go sword fish loins here from Southern Spain,
we've got prawns here that vary anywhere
from Ecuador to Brazil, to the South Atlantic,
such places as Nigeria, and Nigeria coast.
These are global dealers.
They deal with the whole world.
They're not just based in the U.K.,
they source product from all over the world.
But supply in such variety comes at a price.
Trading with the rest of the world
is a relentless 24-hour task.
I mean, the time differences.
You're dealing with Suriname, Latin America.
So they're one time zone.
We're dealing with Dubai, (bell ringing)
completely the other time zone.
You'll get these guys ring you from around the world
saying, "Steven, I've got what you need, you want",
so you've got to be on call.
And then, the evening you're ringing your customers
to see what they want for the following day.
Getting their catch in quickly
is only half the fight
for the fish merchants at Billingsgate.
Now they must sell it.
And time is short.
From the moment fish is pulled from the water,
its quality is deteriorating.
Steve faces a daily battle
to sell his fish before it goes off.
These would have been caught I would say last Friday,
shipped out on a Saturday, landing Sunday night to Heathrow,
and then put in carts on Monday morning.
This fish is already four days old.
Steve has to sell it all today,
because tomorrow it's value could begin to fall.
(bell ringing) Every morning at 4:00 a.m.,
the most feared man in the market,
Principle Fisheries Inspector Barry O'Toole
starts his rounds, looking for any sub-standard produce.
Phillips, where are these from?
What's going on in here?
They're all integrated- -: All right, thank you.
We're appointed by a Royal Charter to inspect fish
within the city of London, to make sure that the quality
of the product is fit for purpose; fit for a man's body.
These are super, where are they from men?
Beaverhead. -: Beaverhead.
Got it, beautiful.
Sourcing and selling such a perishable product
without losing out on quality is difficult to get right.
If there's a mishap on the way the quality will diminish.
If the ice melts off, or it's held up in customs
'cause the paperwork is incorrect.
So there's some of the challenges.
You've got to get every step of the route
from source to here at the market, correct.
And that's not the only problem.
If fish isn't stored properly,
a toxic chemical called histamine can build up
and cause food poisoning.
Billingsgate relies on its reputation
for supplying fresh, healthy fish.
A bad outbreak of food poisoning could shatter
that reputation in an instant.
So Barry's job is vital.
Everybody knows Billingsgate Market.
It's got a global brand, it's a trademark premise
as a place where quality is second to none.
And that has gone through century,
after century after century.
Barry has the power
to condemn whole truckloads of sub-standard fish.
It's a mackerel, I'm looking in the eyes,
I see they're nice and clear, they're a nice sharp color,
opening the gills, if there's any problems with the gills,
there'll be a smell emanating from there.
There'll be a slime build up in there.
No problem with these, no need to smell them.
Fabulous quality, one of my favorite fish, super, packed
with Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids.
All the essential nutrients you can get in one fish.
My favorite fish.
(drumming music)
Traders like Mark Morris
are constantly on the phone,
doing deals with their suppliers around the world.
We're bringing it in by air freight from Iceland,
road trains brought from all over Europe,
we've got bash and bream from Turkey and Greece
I've got cod filets and halibut from Iceland,
I've got fish from Norway, got Polish fish, Scottish fish,
Irish fish, you name it and we sell it.
Even on my days off on a Monday morning
the phone starts ringing at home
at half past five in the morning,
and you have to be buying the fish day.
So over here, for Tuesday morning for your clients to wait.
Sometimes the fish comes in on time,
it's of the best quality and it all sells.
But it doesn't always work out that well.
Fish is late, fish is crap, fish is expensive,
now what's the point?
And these things happen all the time.
And that's where you've got a lot of work.
Cities around the world must be restocked
with perishable foods every day.
And, Billingsgate Fish Market
is a vital link in London's food supply chain.
But buying and selling fish
from suppliers thousands of kilometers away
can quickly turn into a nightmare.
Mark faces a daily battle to turn a profit.
When you open the box up,
and it ain't what the monkey up in Scotland told you it was,
he sells you it 360, and it's so short
it's gonna look like a piece of glass.
You take the lid off and it's dull, and it ain't right,
and the cording ain't there, and it's soft.
Second-rate fish
puts Mark in a difficult position.
I know, okay, I can't serve that to that customer.
because the packing's too late.
So they'll go and do it somewhere else.
Yeah?
Then you get on the phone with a supplier
and you work out a price with them.
That looks great, you all right?
Because he knows who he's talking too, yeah?
And you know who he's talking to yeah?
If it's good, then we price these.
If every day was a best day, then it'd be boring.
It's not just about sourcing the best fish.
The traders have to figure out exactly
how much they can shift each day.
You've got to realize that you just
can't buy fish willy nilly.
I mean it's easy to buy, five-ton 10-ton of fish,
and then hope you're gonna sell it.
You can't, you've got to be clever in how you buy.
So it's all a gamble.
If you get it wrong, it's gonna cost you money.
Every trader is trying
to make money on each deal, but they also need to sell
their fish before it goes bad.
You might start off wanting to make,
I don't know, 25 pounds out of a box of fish.
It might end up that you've gotta lose a fiber on it.
You left sitting there for one day too long
and you might as well take it out and fry it in the dock.
It ain't gonna be worth nothing to you.
Today has been a good day.
Steve has sold five tons of fish worth nearly 50,000 pounds.
Feeding the city is an unrelenting task.
And it's not just about quantity.
There's always a fashion, there's always a trend.
We've got a massive thing
within the last few years with pollock.
Five years ago, five pollock buddy, I couldn't give it away.
No one wanted it, it was crap.
They didn't want to know about it.
Now, there's no pollock companies in the market today, yeah?
It's quite a wait, there should be pollock everywhere.
It's not good, you cannot get it.
Pollock.
No pollock, there's no pollock on the market.
You can't find it.
It does make it hard because people are asking you
to sell something, that just isn't there.
200 kilo allowance, yeah?
You get on that phone, and you chase it and you chase it,
and you ring everyone and you find out what they've got.
That's fine, if they provide it
then don't go under one and a half once they have it.
But in these four gates of the work it's always market
and they're all selling their supplies.
"Go get me this, go get me that."
So then we're pitting against each other.
(rock music)
Billingsgate has supplied London
with fish since the 14th century.
And it continues to be a vital link
in the capitol's food supply chain.
I think London needs Billingsgate
without any shadow of a doubt.
London people want quality.
The days of second-grade fish, second-gradely are gone.
It's been a tough shift,
but the traders will have to repeat it all again tomorrow.
Eight million people living in London
are now eating your fish.
You're going into that many establishments,
you're reaching that many people, it's a great feeling.
I'm done, trade's finished, all again tomorrow.
Not everyone has time for a fresh fish lunch.
In cities the world over, most office workers
have to settle for a quick bite.
The ultimate food to go is the sandwich.
In the U.K. more than 3.4 billion sandwiches
are consumed every year.
Producing the huge quantity U.K. cities demand
is one of the toughest jobs in the food industry.
The market for sandwiches is absolutely immense.
The market overall is worth
about six billion pounds per year,
and it's grown particularly in urban areas.
Pretty much everyone eats sandwiches.
Nottinghamshire, England,
is home to the largest sandwich making factory in the world.
It produces over three million sandwiches
every week for cities across the U.K.
(electronic music)
The operation runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week,
and the work never stops.
It's General Manager Ken Filet's job
to make sure the factory delivers.
We make about 400 different products every single day.
Every day, an army of workers
has to box up over 600,000 sandwiches.
Making this many is an epic challenge.
We're under a huge amount of time pressure under this.
What we're trying to do is get the majority
of the volume through the supply chain,
so that it's on the shelf for Monday lunchtime.
When the sun shines,
people start to picnic in the parks and sandwich sales soar.
So Ken needs to keep a close eye on the weather.
Basically as soon as soon as we get that information
we'll start looking at the production plans,
working our labor plan up and change our capacity plans.
This is when it gets tough.
Ken doesn't want to be left with any unsold sandwiches.
We have experienced up to 50% swings
within a 24-hour period,
just with big changes in the weather.
It's a task made even harder
by the nature of the product.
Our products have a shelf life
of between two and three days,
so the lifespan that we have is very short indeed.
For this reason, production never ceases.
Sandwiches can't be stockpiled,
and stores must receive a fresh delivery every day.
We have hit specific allotted times
to hit our different distribution depots at the set times,
to deliver up and down the country,
from Scotland all the way down to the South of England.
We don't have that flexibility, not to deliver.
We know we have to deliver.
To keep up, every week, 365,000 loaves of bread
are delivered from three different suppliers.
If you stack this many loaves on top of each other
next to the Shard, London's tallest building,
the tower of bread would be 141 times as high,
reaching up over 43 kilometers.
I think sandwiches are such a core part
of a consumer's diet.
You know, we really are fueling the workforce,
and I think particularly in cities
where sandwiches are incredibly important
as a very quick and convenient, and satisfying meal.
It's playing a hugely significant role,
in making sure we keep cities moving.
But it's not all about quantity.
Keeping the sandwich lover interested and engaged
in new and exciting fillings is just as important.
It requires a team of designers
willing to push the boundaries of taste and texture.
And today the team are testing new flavor combinations,
for a major retailer's summer menu.
There are numerous factors to consider.
Well you're looking for a good visual
'cause people always buy with their eyes first.
So, you need to sort of get people drawn in.
But looking good is not enough.
It needs to be good, strong flavors.
Then you've got, and also textures as well.
So obviously you've got cucumber there and pepper,
so you've got a nice crunch,
sort of against the softness of the salmon as well.
Texture is very important.
Whilst the design team works
on speciality sandwich combinations like falafel and hummus
or pesto and sun dried tomato,
the real bread and butter business
continues down on the factory floor.
It's frantic and endless work.
To produce over half a million sandwiches day in, day out,
Ken Filet must keep a very tight reign on stock levels.
And to ensure freshness, the factory only holds
three and a half days worth of stock on site.
Some of our sandwich design is so specific
we don't even have one type of meal.
We have up to 50 different types of meals,
ranging from low fat-low sodium, to higher fat content
depending on what the customer really wants.
In all, more than 300 different ingredients
are used to make the full range of sandwich fillings.
The most popular are used up at an incredible rate.
Each week, 60 tons of mayonnaise, 60 tons of chicken
and 30 tons of cheese are consumed.
Egg mayonnaise is one of the factory's top sellers.
Over 80,000 eggs are chopped and mixed every 24 hours.
Raw eggs can harvest salmonella,
a potentially deadly bacterium.
So before it goes into a sandwich,
every single egg is boiled for 15 minutes
to ensure it is fully cooked.
Once salt and pepper is added,
the egg mayonnaise is ready for spreading.
Each slice of bread must be perfectly positioned.
Otherwise the egg mayo will end up
on the conveyor belt instead of the bread.
Once these sandwiches are made and boxed up,
they head out to one of the 30 delivery lorries
that leave this facility each day.
All this goes on right around the clock.
The fast moving lifestyle of the city
keeps people away from home for longer,
meaning there's less time to do the weekly shopping.
Fast food is one solution, online grocery shopping
and home delivery is another.
It was first introduced 15 years ago,
and since 2009, demand has rocketed
at an average of 16% a year.
Vast new stores have been built around the city of London,
but not a single customer comes in through the doors.
We've built these centers specifically
around the perimeter of London, to supply into London.
Because the population's growing, demand's getting bigger,
and we've got to be there to provide for that future demand.
Our job's to feed the consumer,
which means feeding the city.
These stores are 100% dedicated
to meeting online orders and delivering
the goods directly to the customer.
The layout has been carefully designed
with one goal in mind: speed.
From this center, over 1000 orders are delivered every day.
It's 8:30 a.m., and the majority of vans
have already been sent out for their first run.
But Delivery Team Leader, Katie Abernathy
is running out of time.
Didn't have enough drivers for my later morning runs,
so obviously at 4:30 in the morning
I can't ring people because it is far too early.
So I have to just move everybody out the line,
get all the early runs out,
and then at eight o'clock start ringing around.
There you Rob, thank you very much,
have a good trip. Thank you.
Customers can specify to within an hour
when they want their shopping delivered.
Take your 1, 3, 5, I can do you.
Hitting these time slots
drives the entire online operation.
It is like working a jigsaw puzzle.
Maneuvering bits and pieces around to make it all work
so that drivers are in the right place.
Orders can be placed up until midnight,
with a request for delivery just a few hours later.
This means Katie and her team don't always know exactly
how many drivers are needed for the next day's jobs,
until they arrive in the morning.
Leah, is she back down tonight?
Print Shards.
We start at half past 4:00, we allocate the vans
we load the vans, the drivers go out, they come back,
and we just keep reloading them all the way through.
And we deliver 'till 11:00 o'clock at night, shut down,
and we just repeat the whole thing every day.
All right, there we go print Shards,
those are yours, 1, 2, 4, thank you.
Have a good day. -: And you too.
Right, print Shard, right Leah, you're 1, 1, 7.
With customers so tight for time,
the pressure is always on to deliver.
Leah, what number are you?
Our lights had a bit of a challenge.
It makes the day a bit more interesting.
As Katie struggles to make deliveries on time,
new stock is arriving.
It's Warehouse Manager John Gordon's task
to make sure new deliveries are put out
on the shelves as quickly as possible.
The trucks just arrived and we've got
about 18 tons of produce coming off.
This particular truck carries, as all our trucks do,
carries everything from health and beauty,
to deodorant, shampoos, basically to cereals,
to toilet rolls, to tins of soup, the whole lot.
There simply isn't space
to store or hold food for long.
The whole site works on a continuous system
of stock arriving one side,
and deliveries heading out the other.
The goods that come in every day,
by and large flow through the system on a 24-hour basis.
We don't empty the store every 24 hours,
but we have to top off continuously.
Somebody that comes in at 6:00 in the morning
could be at somebody's doorstep at 6:00 at night.
To get everything ready for the first van
to leave at 6:00 a.m., means working through the night
to restock the shelves and prepare the orders.
(machinery operating)
One of the first jobs is to prepare any fresh produce.
A normal shift is 9:00 p.m.
to 5:00 a.m., and so that we can get all the orders out
ready for the pickers at four o'clock.
As online shopping becomes more popular,
everyone here is under pressure to deliver.
It can be full-on sometimes and most of our busy nights
are Thursday, Friday, Saturdays,
and that's when the heat is on to get everything done.
With the fish prepared,
this order is ready to be packed.
Wrap that up, put that there,
and then what we do is put a label on the side
with the customer's name on it,
and then we go and put it in the pickers.
Out on the shop floor,
the early morning shift has clocked on.
A team of 75 pickers place orders
into baskets ready for delivery.
Time is of the essence, but the warehouse is 92 meters long
and 76 wide, with over 25,000 different products.
Pickers depend on a wrist-mounted computer
to make sure every order is filled as quickly as possible.
It tells them which product is needed and where to find it.
On busy shifts, even supervisors
like Tanya Smart have to get stuck in
to keep everything on track and on time.
So, my little machine tells me exactly where to go.
It's telling me to go to 49.
Rather than travel all over the store
to complete an entire order, pickers are each responsible
for products in a certain area.
It tells me to scan the tray,
tells me exactly where it is on the shelf,
and it goes,
and off that tray it should go.
Once each part of the order is fulfilled,
the conveyor system automatically moves the tray
on to the next picking station.
To keep up, each picker has to find
a huge number of individual items in the morning rush.
41,000 we've had to pick this morning.
For me personally, I'll average pick,
you know, a couple of thousand.
With all these items to find,
pickers are constantly on the go.
It sure does keep me very fit.
It keeps me on my toes.
We're always running around from zone to zone.
Also, if you use a tray you need to go and find it.
So it is very fast.
By the end of the shift
then I'm ready to just go home and put my feet up.
And I always do my own shopping.
Or someone else come and pick it.
But it's not over quite yet.
Customers depend on pickers like Tanya
to get their shopping done just as they would
if they were in the store.
And to keep customer satisfaction high, shoppers are able
to place special instructions along with their order.
But some are more specific with their requests then most.
There is a certain customer we have
and they ask for ginger, loose ginger,
and then it says five kilos.
And then underneath it, because some people don't,
they really, really don't want five kilos,
it says, "Yes, I really do want five kilos of ginger."
I personally think they must run a restaurant or something
as nobody can eat that much ginger.
Once complete,
orders are sent to the delivery van.
My load is about 10 customers per van.
So yeah, it's all the charts, all the trays are on board,
so I'm happy with it and I'll sign off the paperwork
and then take the keys back in,
and it's ready for the driver.
This is the final stage, vans are loaded,
and the vans go out, delivered to the customers,
customers are happy, and that's it.
(upbeat music)
Each day up to 165 vans
leave this store packed with goods.
In total, London is now served
by 11 online delivery centers.
Customers,
really do enjoy,
because they don't have to go out to the shops anymore.
It's very convenient for them.
Especially days like this when it's pouring rain,
they get their shopping delivered.
Shopping like this
was barely imaginable 20 years ago.
And with more centers planned,
the number of deliveries made each day
will rise even further.
Every day is a constant demand for food.
People are always gonna want food,
and the operation is only gonna to get bigger and bigger
because people are always gonna need food, so-
Feeding our cities
requires a huge logistical effort.
As urban populations rise, it's going to become tough
to find enough space to produce the food our cities need.
To help solve this problem, a new breed of high-tech farmers
are growing food in the most unlikely of places.
This 900 square meter farm sits on the roof
of an apartment block in the heart of the Bronx,
a borough of New York city.
There are hundreds of thousands
of rooftops given to any city environment.
This is basically untapped real estate.
It's not being used for anything.
So why not put up a greenhouse?
Grow some vegetables, and grow some herbs.
New York receives an average
of seven hours of sunshine every day.
J.J. Melendez is one of a team
of eight urban farmers putting it to good use.
People can't believe,
there's a greenhouse in the South Bronx.
They can't believe there's veggies in the hood.
And once we overcome that specific challenge,
I think this will take off.
It's a challenge the farm is succeeding at.
In its first full year, Sky Vegetables
is on track to produce 45 tons of food,
most of which will be sold to customers in the city.
Unlike a conventional farm, the plants don't grow in soil.
Instead, special foam cubes provide support for the roots.
These cubes sit in channels of water
that have a special solution of minerals added to it,
to ensure the plants get all the nutrients they need.
The water system operates on a closed loop
so there's wastage, and any unused nutrients are recycled.
The big advantage of this method is that it requires
around 5% of the water that would be used
in the equivalent area of soil-based farming.
Automatic controls monitor and adjust
the temperature, humidity and light levels.
Over a year, this one rooftop can produce
up to 20 times more food than a field of the same size.
Kate Ahern is the farm manager.
It's her job to oversee every stage of production.
The process starts here in the germination chamber.
Seeds are placed here, and then after a couple of days
they emerge as plants that are ready to transplant.
Then they're moved to propagation tables.
They're fed a custom blend of nutrients,
which is fairly weak,
just to get them started on their growing process.
And then we'll be able to see that even by tomorrow,
they'll have already started to look
less like little sprouts and more like real plants.
Once these seedlings
start to look like lettuce, they are moved again.
Final place that the plants live in the greenhouse
are the finishing channels, where they have
the optimum amount of space and light, to grow.
These runs right here are ready to harvest.
So at that stage, we would just
lift them right out of the channel,
and you see what a beautiful green head of lettuce.
Nice, healthy roots.
We could have this harvested and packed,
and out to the consumer within the day.
Beautiful, fresh local New York City produce.
Today, the team will harvest
and deliver approximately 200 kilos
of fresh salad to customers around New York.
It's far less than the industrial farm in California,
but this salad won't have to travel anywhere near as far,
and it can be consumed on the same day it is harvested.
Chef Chrissy Michaels is a regular customer
and supporter of this new style of production.
What's really special about this stuff
is it's still alive.
So if the flavors and the micronutrients
are leaching out every moment that it's been harvested,
this hasn't actually been harvested
until someone cuts into it,
and puts it on their slice of pizza,
or on their sandwich or in their salad.
(dramatic music)
With all these sunlit roofs to choose from,
urban farming could play an important role
in the city's future food supply.
The city's always expanding, growing, changing.
Because, as everything becomes more congested with people,
there's a need more for food, need more for everything.
As far as the solution I'm not too sure,
but I know it can't hurt.
It definitely will help.
5,000 kilometers from New York,
at Stockbridge Technology Center
in North Yorkshire in England,
high-tech farming is advancing to a new level.
Plants only need specific wavelengths
or colors of light to grow.
So here, green beans, herbs and salad leaves are cultivated
in a windowless building, under 40,000 LED lights.
By carefully controlling the lighting,
Biologist Dr. Phil Davis is trying to work out
which color combinations create the best plants.
In this facility what we're doing
is just taking the bits of light that are most effective.
So we're throwing out the green light which is reflected,
and we're just focusing in on the red and blue light.
It turns out that plants grow best
under red and blue light.
So under these red and blue lights,
the plants look kind of a blackie, slightly gray color,
and that's because they're absorbing over 90%
of all of the red and blue light.
And they can then use all of that light
for further synthesis and growth.
Now if we turn on a white light,
we can see the plant suddenly flashing
this nice green color, and that's because
they're not absorbing a lot of the green light.
It's not just the color
of the light that is important.
(classical music)
Unlike regular light bulbs, LEDs don't get hot.
So Phil can put them much closer to the plants.
This means he can stack multiple layers
of plants on top of one another.
If we have two layers of crop,
we double the area of crop per land.
But if you then started having 20 layers,
you could take a much smaller area of land
to grow the same amount of crop.
So it's a lot more intensive horticulture.
So we can produce a lot more crop with less land.
Growing plants like this,
gives Phil complete control over the environment
and means he can produce consistent crops all year round.
But he still needs to perfect the taste.
This is a basil crop that we're growing, and we're hoping,
and early tastes suggest we can really improve the flavor.
That you can change the amount of oil content of the leaves,
and then really refine the light recipe
that gives the best flavor fruit for a crop.
And these particular plants are very fresh
and very powerfully flavored.
So, it's going well.
By experimenting with different light recipes,
Phil and the team can tweak the growth of the plants.
By selecting different red, blue, and foreign mixes
we can control the morphology of the plants.
So we can control how tall they grow,
how many leaves or how large the leaves are,
and we can also affect their flowering time if we want.
Phil's goal is to produce a database containing
the perfect light recipe for almost every crop.
Instructions that will grow a tasty plant
in the shortest time possible.
So I think this system really
does apply very well to a city,
because it can be done in a very small area,
but still produce a huge amount of food.
And that's exciting scientifically, but also,
it has a huge impact for human society as a whole,
because we can start to improve our crop production
to feed the rapidly increasing population.
(mellow music)
Producing food for the billions of people
that live in our cities requires a huge effort.
Thank you very much.
Serving the customer is the last stage
in a production process that has spanned the globe.
In New York, the orders are piling up thick and fast,
for pizza Restaurant Manager Mark Kenyon.
We really need to make sure
everything is on point, food, service and delivery as well.
The raw ingredients
that go into a New York pizza,
are produced right across the U.S. and beyond.
We get a lot of our ingredients from Midland,
our flour is imported for the dough,
our tomatoes, mozzarella di bufala,
our anchovies, our stracciatella,
you can really tell the difference.
We bring in our food and we kind of put it all together,
that perfect pizza.
Customers in New York can be very picky
and we try to get the pizzas to them as fast as possible
with the highest possible quality.
(rock music)
Out on the streets,
Delivery Rider O.J. Fontanas is up against it.
The rush hour traffic is holding him up
and he is having a tough time getting through.
The worst enemy we have is Yellow taxi cabs.
Them cutting us off, almost trying to hit me.
You see what I'm saying about Yellow taxis?
(car horn blowing)
You have to think in a quick instant, you know?
It's like having guts.
Are you gonna take the move?
Reaching his target average
of 30 to 40 deliveries a day requires nerves of steel.
I kind of like the adrenaline.
Knowing that the Yellow taxi is out there
almost trying to hit me.
I try not to get mad because,
it's the way that it works down here.
No matter how hard it might be,
O.J. has to deliver on time.
What are we not delivering?
(upbeat music)
With our cities growing all the time,
the food supply has to keep up.
Transport links will be pushed to the limit,
farms will stretch, buildings will produce for themselves
and technology will play a vital role.
But through all of this,
a hidden team of dedicated workers will be there
to put food on the table.