How Birds Eye peas go from fresh to frozen in just 150 minutes

This year's pea harvest in East Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire, a particularly long one, is in full flow, reaping 45,000 tonnes of Birds Eye peas that feed the nation.

To ensure they are as the old jingle put it "sweet as the moment when the pod went 'pop'" everything is ordered with military precision.

The vast acreage is divided into five areas from Silver in Holderness, to Gold in Driffield, Lime from Barton upon Humber to Caenby Corner, as well as Purple in Beverley and Amber in Howdenshire.

Each is served by a cavalcade of three viners, trucks and ancillary vehicles, with the lorries leaving for Hull's Birds Eye factory every half hour.

The Yorkshire Post caught up with Silver Area at Fitling in Holderness.

The vehicles can be heard before they are seen - the sweet fragrance of the harvested peas filling the air.

"There's a team which walks across every field and they take samples which are sent to the factory to be analysed," said Guy Ellerington, CEO of The Green Pea Company, who has been working in peas for more than 20 years.

"That happens three or four days before harvest so you start to build up an idea of the crop, knowing when they will be ripe."

Mr Ellerington swears he can tell a Birds Eye pea at ten paces when sitting down for a meal.

"You can always tell a decent pea," he said. "To me it sticks out like a sore thumb. It's the uniformity across the plate, the size, the colour, the vibrancy of the colour and the taste itself. We are looking to capture that sweetness - they are harvested and frozen in 150 minutes."

Not everyone likes to be woken by what sounds like advancing tanks as they rumble down the road in the middle of the night and Mr Ellerington admits they have had a few complaints.

"We are a 24/7 operation and we have such a tight window to be able to harvest the peas - once they are at their optimum we have up to six to eight hours to get them harvested."

People imagine the peas get knocked and bashed about to get them to open up, but "the last thing we want is too much contact - it works on pressure," said Mr Ellerington. "You are looking to apply pressure to the pod so it bursts open.

"Ninety per cent of the waste product drops out of the machine."

Drilling and Silver area manager Mark Chambers says this year's pea harvest is the longest he's ever known.

The dry weather followed by wet and dry spates saw peas grow slower and this year the harvest will take around 70 days, far longer than the usual 50.

Peas - 15 different varieties of garden peas are sown - are drilled up to nine inches deep to make sure they hit moisture and they aim for 95 per cent germination.

"It's one of the most profitable crops - probably trumped by potatoes and broccoli," says Mr Chambers who farms 200 acres at Watton.

"The only thing we are taking from the field is the peas - we leave everything else. It is green manure basically, and the nitrogen that is fixed in the soil goes towards the following wheat crop, so you don't have to use as much fertiliser."

Mr Ellerington paid tribute to the hard work of the 250 growers who supply the company. "Without their input and them being part of the company we wouldn't have an operation at all."

Peas, glorious peas

One of the oldest cultivated crops, wild peas are native to the Mediterranean.

Birds Eye derives from Clarence Birdseye who invented the fast freezing food process in 1924.

The Hull factory on Salveson Way is one of the largest pea processing plants in the world. Birds Eye has had a presence in the city for nearly 60 years.

Captain Birds Eye became the Birds Eye advertising mascot in 1967, played by actor John Hewer until 1998.