Acrivarn’s Epic Flapjack Production: A Sticky Toffee Flapjack Success Story
The long-running series opens the doors to some of the largest factories in Britain, discovering how super-sized production lines maintain the quality of their output. Our products were featured in Season 9, Episode 4, as host Paddy McGuinness visited a purpose-built facility in Hayes, West London, which turns out around 46 million sticky flapjacks per year.
The episode takes viewers behind the scenes of large-scale flapjack manufacturing. It’s a fantastic showcase of industrial baking excellence and a fitting backdrop for Acrivarn’s bespoke rack ovens.
The factory utilises three of our ovens, each accommodating four trollies of flapjacks racks – amounting to 37,000 sweet treats when full! The custom-built nature of our rack ovens is a vital aspect in supporting the critical final step in production. They were designed to allow the trollies to be wheeled straight into place, a crucial time saver to get the flapjack in to bake as quickly as possible. Each of the three ovens has a rotating plate which continuously spins the trolleys to facilitate an even bake across every rack and ensure the soft, chewy texture that makes a flapjack so delicious.
Whether baking moist flapjacks or roasting meat and poultry, Acrivarn’s ovens handle it all. They adapt seamlessly to different product requirements and support a wide array of rack types—from standard UK racks to continental and custom sizes—and can operate on natural gas, LPG, oil, or electricity.
Acrivarn ovens use even airflow, heat exchangers, and programmable controls to ensure consistent baked results—even when producing millions of units. Whether it’s sticky toffee flapjacks, cakes, pies, biscuits, savoury items or morning goods – from tinned bread to soft rolls and everything in between – the ovens deliver minimal weight loss, precise browning, and perfect texture every time.
Acrivarn rack ovens are also engineered to minimise energy consumption. Heat exchangers recover thermal energy rapidly, and the VSDs allow fan speeds to be reduced during idle periods, cutting energy use, carbon emissions, and costs without sacrificing readiness for the next bake.
As viewers learned, maintaining consistency and scale is no small feat, but Acrivarn’s rack ovens make it possible. Our solutions confidently handle large volumes, maintain product quality, and deliver reliable results throughput.
By aligning Acrivarn’s baking excellence with the incredible production figures shown, the episode highlights exactly what sets Acrivarn ovens apart: industrial scalability with artisanal quality intact.
