Behind the Scenes: Packing, Prepping, and Pancakes
By Lottie Hopkinson-Woolley
The team spent last weekend at Miriam’s house in Yorkshire making and vacuum packing food. Jess and Lottie drove up late on Friday night after work in Jess’ trusty van, ‘Gethin’, arriving around midnight with all of Velocity’s loose equipment and some very tasty snacks kindly provided by Love Corn and New Forest Fruits.
The alarms went off at 8am on Saturday, and it was all systems go. We spent the day preparing breakfasts and trail mixes at the Turkey Farm—a huge thanks to Alison and Christopher (Mims’ parents) for letting us use the farm and their massive vacuum-packing machine!
We started with the breakfast meals, which required an incredible 85kg of oats and 120kg of dried fruit and nuts! We set up a highly efficient production line, with Jess and Lottie bagging ingredients, while Mims operated the vacuum machine, ensuring each bag passed quality control.
We prepared seven different recipes to cover a week’s worth of breakfasts. Since we could be at sea for up to 29 weeks, we had to make 87 meals of each recipe! The recipes range from simple oats with protein powder to more exotic flavours like goji berry almond bakewell. Each meal contains around 800 to 1,000 calories and will make up one fifth of our daily calorie intake.
The barn was freezing, and our toes and fingers went numb pretty quickly! Mims took to squatting every time she loaded the vacuum packer and Jess and Lottie danced or lunged their way to keep warm, safe to say this lasted for all of 30 minutes! Thankfully, around 10am, Alison brought over some bacon butties, which were very much appreciated. A bit later Christopher brought over a Dryrobe for Jess to wear as she was frozen!
After a couple of hours, we reached our banana recipe which consisted of: oats, milk powder, sugar, protein powder, chia seed and banana chips. The banana chips caused some issues by puncturing the bags, so some had to be double-bagged and carefully checked.
Around 6pm we finished the breakfasts and moved on to the trail mixes, which took less time since they involved fewer ingredients. We had not sat down or taken a proper break all day, apart from the occasional quick loo stop, our backs were starting to feel the strain! Thankfully we did not go hungry, Mims had done a snack run the night before, we had a smorgasbord of: carrots, hummus, grapes, babybells and of course a Terry’s choccy orange. We called it a day at 8pm, headed back to the house for pizza and a well-earned G&T and even enjoyed a dip in the hot tub before an early night!
The next day, we were treated to blueberry pancakes with bacon and maple syrup, courtesy of Alison. Afterwards, we returned to the Turkey Farm to finish off the trail mixes. Lottie handled the ingredients, Mims vac-packed and Jess unloaded the van full of Velocity’s loose equipment. Jess also organised everything into crates, categorising the items so we can easily find them when we return for our pre-shipping inspection in a few weeks. We took to round two of the banana chips not liking the vacuum packing, so we had to re-bag the banana trail mixes too.
Around mid-afternoon Jess and Lottie headed back down the M1, leaving Mims to finish vacuum-packing the last of the trail mixes. In total, we made 600 breakfast meals and made a good dent on the trail mixes—a job well done!
