Meet Rob Jackson, Product and Process Specialist at Nestlé UK and Ireland. He’s usually on the factory floor, where no two days are quite the same. Whether it’s testing a new ingredient, fine-tuning a recipe, trialling new equipment or adapting a manufacturing process. But over the past year, he’s been working very closely with one ingredient: wheat that’s been regeneratively farmed.
That’s because Rob has played a key role in bringing our new partnership with Wildfarmed to life in the KitKat factory, testing, and making sure the recipe still delivers that signature snap.
Together with Wildfarmed, our KitKats are now made with a regenerative wheat blend, an important step forward in our journey to source ingredients more sustainably. Behind that launch is a team of people helping to make it happen. So, let’s catch up with Rob.
Rob, what was your role in helping bring this product to life?
“I’m the technical lead on the project. That means it was my job to make sure the new wheat flour worked in the factory just as well as our conventional wheat flour, or even better. The process started with working alongside the Wildfarmed team and our laboratory experts at our global Nestlé Product Technology Centre on our York campus, to make sure the flour met our requirements. That included testing small samples and making changes at the wheat blending and flour milling stages with Wildfarmed, before we even brought any flour into the factory.
“Once we were confident, the next stage was working with our operations team on the factory floor to bake flour under trial conditions in our wafer ovens, solving any challenges and making small tweaks to our process, so we could deliver the same classic KitKat that people know and love.”
What were some of the biggest challenges in working with a new type of wheat?
“Wheat is a natural ingredient, so it can vary a lot depending on the varieties grown, where and when they are grown, and how much rain or sunshine they get along the way. That means when you change to wheat sourced from farms using regenerative farming practices, there will naturally be some differences in the flour. The flour needed to make wafers is not like bread flour you can buy in the supermarket; it is quite a specialist ingredient - and it makes up the majority of the wafer, so it is really important to get it right. Wafer is the first part of the KitKat process, so if you can't make wafer then you can't make any KitKats, and then we have a whole factory line making nothing!
“The wafer baking process works best when everything is consistent. So, the challenge is about being adaptable, making sure we can still produce the same classic KitKat wafer, with a shift in ingredients. For this project, it was about coming together with our expertise and Wildfarmed’s expertise to produce the perfect flour for wafer.”
