A truck loaded with hundreds of live chickens stops in front of the barrier that blocks the nondescript road in Scunthorpe. The driver exits, papers are exchanged and the barriers are opened. The chickens are here to be slaughtered, and I – along with the 20 or so other mostly eastern and southern Europeans – have come to get a job helping process them.

But unlike my co-workers I have been sent undercover by the Guardian to investigate conditions inside the poultry processing plant operated by the 2 Sisters Food Group – the UK’s largest poultry firm. Specifically, I’m here to see if food hygiene rules are being adhered to since chicken is the main culprit in the spread of a bug called campylobacter – the most common cause of food poisoning in the UK.

Inside the factory 100 people are dressed in hairnets and orange construction helmets filling a room the size of a school gym.

The chill turns people’s cheeks red and my hands blue. Five fast moving conveyor belts bring hundreds of dead chickens from a neighbouring room.

A woman with a blue helmet enters and shouts: we have a new order. We have to move faster. More chickens are coming on the fast moving conveyor. Most of the workers look as though they have been through all this before.

But the slower and inexperienced ones like me are looking anxious.

I’m working at the end of one of the conveyor belts, grabbing cold whole chickens from a big container and placing them in blue baskets.

Next to me, a chicken that has fallen from the conveyor belt lies on the floor and is hit by a trolley and walked over by a co-worker wearing boots. The team leader picks the chicken up and, with the grace of a yoga teacher, throws it in the container placed at the end of another conveyor belt. Other workers are doing the same thing with the chickens that frequently end up on the dirty floor. Instead of the bin, they all go back into the production chain. I wonder where they will end up?

Radu Ciorniciuc

The undercover reporter