Russia’s Processing Potato Lineup Takes Shape: Chips, Dry Mash and Fries From Domestic Varieties
The head of the A.G. Lorkh Federal Research Center for Potato names home-bred varieties for crisps, dehydrated flakes and French fries. We Fry plans to triple its processing of 'Vostorg' this year.
Russian breeders are no longer talking only about table potatoes. In the Gossortkomissiya (State Variety Commission) podcast “Selektsionnye smysly,” Vasily Byzov, head of the A.G. Lorkh Federal Research Center for Potato, outlined a set of domestic varieties matched to specific processing lines. The Center shared his comments on its official VK community.
- Crisps: ‘Evpatiy’ “has proven itself very well” for chip processing, Byzov said.
- Dehydrated mash: ‘Artur’ was developed together with the Pogar Potato Factory. According to Byzov, it has a high starch content.
- French fries: ‘Vostorg’ is grown by We Fry (Vi Fray), Russia’s leading frozen-fry maker, on its own fields. Byzov said more than 1,000 t were processed into finished product last year and more than 3,000 t are planned this year. He called the variety “absolutely competitive” with ‘Innovator’. The same 1,000 t → 3,000 t figures were reported in July at the All-Russian Field Day in Altai.
For the fresh market, Byzov named ‘Krasa Meshchery’ and ‘Sadon’ as home-bred alternatives to popular imported varieties. He likened ‘Sadon’ to ‘Colombo’ and ‘Krasa Meshchery’ to ‘Gala’. He also pointed to early varieties such as ‘Gulliver’, ‘Meteor’ and ‘Sprinter’, which allow two harvests a year in suitable regions.
Context
We Fry operates a potato processing plant in Lipetsk Region, launched in 2018. Interfax put the plant’s capacity at up to 200,000 t of potatoes a year. Against that scale, 3,000 t of ‘Vostorg’ is still a trial volume, but it is a commercial trial inside the country’s largest fry supply chain. Russia’s official target is to raise the share of domestic varieties in seed potato to 70% by 2030.
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Why it matters
Processing is where the import dependence of Russian potato genetics has been deepest: industrial lines are built around a few proven Western varieties. A domestic lineup covering crisps, flakes and fries, already tested at factories, is the first real alternative. Processors outside Russia sourcing from the region will want to watch how these varieties perform at scale.
Photo: Optical sorting of potato strips on a French-fry line (illustrative). SortingExpert / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
