Hayden's has gone from strength to strength since its move to Hopton Industrial Estate from Marlborough seven years ago.

The business was set up by local baker Chris Hayden in 1976, operating out of a bakery shop in Marlborough High Street before expanding into a factory in London Road.

It eventually outgrew its Marlborough origins and moved to Hopton in 1996. In August 1999 it was sold to bakery giant Rank Hovis McDougall before being acquired by The Real Good Food Company, in May last year.

Waitrose, with whom Hayden's has been trading for over 20 years, is by far its biggest customer.

The Devizes plant prepares and bakes all Waitrose's fruit flans and tarts, and "morning goods" Danish pastries, doughnuts, croissants and so on for the high-quality supermarket's 147 stores throughout the UK.

Hayden's also supplies a range of delicious doughnuts, yum-yums, to Marks & Spencer.

Managing director Dennis Scott said: "We have already begun to look at our investment programme. We are ordering new equipment and have plans to extend the building here.

"At the moment our operation is very labour-intensive but with new equipment we can increase our output by 50 to 60 per cent though the net number of staff will stay the same."

For a volume bakery, Hayden's retains a very loyal workforce, with many people staying with the company for many years, and the large majority of employees coming from with a ten-mile radius of the factory.

The company is about to recruit more workers in order to handle seasonal growth but has no worries about finding the right people as it is in the enviable position of having a waiting list of people looking for work.

The interior of the plant is a curious mixture of production line and family bakery. The air is full of wonderful smells of food preparation and cooking, but there is a constant atmosphere of concentrated activity.

The operation is 24 hours a day, seven days a week as the demand for their wonderful products is satisfied. Staff put in a 12-hour day, four days on and four days off.

Huge mixing bowls deal with 200kg of pastry mixture at a go, enough to bake 2,000 Danish pastries or croissants.

At another machine, workers load great slabs of butter which are folded many times with the dough. We are not talking about low-calorie health food here.

At the conveyor belts, workers sprinkle sultanas, spread custard and fold the dough by hand. These are high-quality baked items and Waitrose customers are prepared to pay a little bit extra to have something a bit special with their lattes or Lapsang Souchong.

John Slevin, one of the managers in the 'ambient' preparation room, as opposed to the chilled room, has been with Hayden's for 18 years. He is by no means the longest-serving member of staff and puts down the loyalty of the employees to the variety of work they are asked to do.

He said: "In a volume bakery operation, you wouldn't see so many people working on the tables, but you need the old bakery skills here and that is what people enjoy. I wouldn't have stayed as long as I have if I had been doing the same thing day in and day out."

In the chilled preparation room, a group of women show their skill with the fruit tarts, a Hayden's speciality. They are all prepared by hand and are a work of art, almost too beautiful to eat.

Julia Allmark leads the small but effective team. She said: "The bases come through from the ambient room and we fill them with fresh fruit.

"The fruit is all hand placed but we still manage to make thousands of fruit tarts a day."

The fruit comes from all over the world and is purchased through local supplier G&S Fruits in nearby Coate, whose employees prepare the fruit by hand on Hayden's premises. G&S Fruits work hand in glove with Hayden's to select fruit of the highest standard available to make delicious tarts.

Close by are trays of Tartes au Citron, chocolate orange tarts, apple and blackberry pies, French apple tarts, roulades and a host of other mouth-watering items. They are ready for packing and taking through to the distribution area, a vast cathedral of plastic trays, all numbered and ready for dispatch to stores all over Britain.

Within 24 hours they will be on supermarket shelves from Cornwall to Nottinghamshire or in shopping trolleys or carrier bags on their way home to provide someone with a tasty treat for tea.

Martin Pletts from the new product development department, who was giving me the guided tour, said: "From 4.30pm on the lorries start arriving to take the goods all over the country. It is like a military operation.

"The trays are all numbered with the code for a particular store and they are loaded on the relevant lorries to go straight out."

As the demand rises for high-quality foods from supermarkets, Hayden's future seems assured.

Quality assurance is taken seriously and it has been known that a whole line has been scrapped because it does not come up to Hayden's high standards.

A quality audit is carried out on every product, starting at the front door where the ingredients for each product are issued to the production lines.

Visitors to the factory are required to sign a form saying they have not been in contact with any infectious diseases and they must dress in protective clothing. Our photographer needed special permission to bring his cameras into the preparation areas.