French fries are amazingly popular the world over. And whether they are bought from the supermarket in a pack of frozen or fresh fried in a restaurant, the consumer wants them to be just right. This is where the drying stage is important, as Andre Erasmus discovers.
Gentle handling, uniform moisture removal and precise control over the drying process are keys to high quality French fries and every French fries manufacturer knows this. French fries are growing in sales around the world and processors are often hard put to keep up with demand. A recent example of this is Farm Frites signing an agreement with Inner Mongolia Linkage Potato Co to set up a joint venture in WudanTown, ChifengCity in Inner Mongolia in China. The joint venture will build a new French fry factory and target the premium segment of the Chinese French fry market. Linkage is active in the potato sector for several years. The company produces minitubers and seed potatoes and is also active in potato cultivation and potato storage.
The perfect end product
Linkage supplies potatoes to several large customers and also operates a potato flakes factory in Wudan Town themselves. Farm Frites is one of the large global players in the French fry market with production facilities in the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Egypt and Argentina. The new French fry factory will have a capacity of 70.000 tonnes frozen French fries annually and will be built right next to the current flakes factory of Linkage in Wudan Town. But the quest globally is for the perfect end product and the question is, of course, what is the best way to attain this and ensure, as a result, the perfect end product? But another factor which is growing in importance and needs to be considered is the increased need for food safety.
Read more on perfect end products, food safety or high thermal efficiency on the last issue of Potato Processing International.
