Snackmasters

Snackmasters was a fun show, with the bulk of the entertainment derived from watching world-class (and sometimes Michelin-starred) chefs trying to figure out and recreate popular food from production-line process. Naturally, the frustrations as their efforts fall apart was gold for audiences. The now-ubiquitous Jade Adams brought the required educational content to allow its blatant product plugging to go ahead, and good old Fred Sirieix is a personable enough host when he's not blatantly course-correcting some of the contestants, but with respectable ratings and an international franchise, many wonder why it only ran for a short time.

When looking closely, it becomes obvious. Everything was fine whilst the contestants where making more specialist things like chocolate bars, which taxed the chefs' skills to try and replicate them on a smaller scale, but it was when fast-food was brought into the show that the trouble soon started. When confronted with reproducing a Domino's pepperoni pizza, true-blue Italian Francesco Mazzei was downright hostile about the product from the start, and became increasingly vitriolic about it as the episode progressed, which must have REALLY annoyed the owners of Domino's. Things weren't quite as venomous when teams competed to re-create KFC's top secret recipe, but there was still a good deal of resentment. It really wouldn't have helped the shows' fortunes when, after his work was described one of KFC's senior representatives, as being "the closest they've tasted", winner Tom Aikens addressed the camera and listed the entire recipe to blow the lid of the secrecy.

Is it any wonder it didn't come back?

It's a shame they only run 3 episodes at a time. I've only seen the first 3, but loved them.

The programme has two elements. There is the challenge delivered to two professional chefs to reproduce the episodes featured snack. While the chefs and their kitchens work out the recipe and method, we are shown the actual manufacturing processes behind the snacks, although the recipes lack the details of the guarded secret ingredients.

It's very entertaining to see professional chefs try to reproduce our favourite snack foods, they are so competitive, the lengths they'll go to to win the challenge. I will now go on the hunt for the episodes I didn't know existed.

Great idea for a show, it's fascinating and fun to see chefs try and recreate snacks.

But the presentation just totally ruins it and makes it unwatchable, for me anyway.

The presenter is not very interesting, funny or charming, the comedian is horribly unfunny and the script is just painful.

If you cut all that out of the show you end up with 20 minutes of something really interesting and amusing.

Greer show, concept and really interesting but ruined by the awful Jayde and Fred who is only tolerable in small doses. His quest to make fake tension like these successful chefs value a trophy is ludicrous, get a better host and fact finder and this would be good tv.

The idea of this show is great - for big-time chefs to try and mimic the foods we see everyday in fast food outlets and the supermarkets. However, it is let down by a combination of the incorrect casting of a presenter and the general format. The presenter is likable but it seems like he is forced to saw/do a lot of the things and it just does not feel natural.

On the topic of the format, the first 10 minutes of the show is the 'big reveal' of the week's item to replicate. 10 minutes. That is 20% of the show's entire runtime. This should have been 4-5 mins of content, but it feels dragged out. The next 25mins are where we see the chefs try to replicate the item in their kitchen. I enjoyed this part, but it is ruined again by the presenter making visits that again do not feel natural. It just felt so artificial. Interweaved in this, we see how the items are actualy made in the factories/kitchens and I loved this insight. This was the better parts of the show. The presenter here felt more in-place and she was very relatable. Good job here. I just wish it had more showtime, which could have been resolved by shaving the first 10mins of the episode.

The final part of the episode is where we see the chefs replicate the item and present it to the judges, who are industry experts that we have seen throughout the episode. This is the best part, but rather than it being an 'all-round' winner, I think something along the lines of points (e.g. Look, texture, taste etc.) would have given us a better understanding as to why the winning chef wins. A couple of episodes gave a real surprise as to the winner, since the judges gave a real leaning towards a chef who subsenquently lost.

All in all, a great concept. However, a combination of poor casting and organisation means that the execution was less than ideal.