How your fried snacks reach the racks?
Do you have a guilty pleasure? Do you pause while walking down the supermarket’s chips and fried snacks aisle? If the answer to those questions is yes, do you ever wonder about the journey of a raw potato from a farm up to the crispy, crunchy, and salty goodness that goes into your mouth? It involves many steps, from the raw potato input to peeling, slicing, and blanching the potato until it is fried and coated with your favorite flavors and spices. With growing competition in the fried snack industry, these steps must be carried out carefully and consistently to produce the highest quality chips.
From farm to the fryer
The availability of raw inputs combined with a high local and global demand provides food processing companies and local farmers with many growth opportunities. A regular potato chip plant makes thousands of chips every hour. The potatoes are washed and de-stoned to ensure they are clean and prevent damage to the peeling, slicing, or dicing units. In the peeling stage, batch type, abrasive peeling takes place. The potatoes then move along a belt to a slicing machine that slices them quickly using a razor-sharp blade. Ripple potato chips are cut by a serrated knife. It is then transported into a blancher to reduce the sugar content from the potato slices to prevent quick dark coloring and maintain product quality. These potato slices are then put into a vat of boiling vegetable oil with special deep fryer equipment. As the potato chips cook, the water inside them turns to steam. After this, they are collected, drained, salted, and then ready to be packaged.
Producing the perfect bite
The fried snack market around the world is constantly growing. The main factors facilitating this growth include lifestyle changes, increased urbanization levels, and simply because the population has access to many more snacks than in previous years. This makes optimal production and quality control of utmost importance. The transportation of your product through the fryer must be perfectly done. Every piece must have the same frying time and no possibility of staying behind and burning. The industrial fryers for making potato chips are a continuous and fully automated production plant that ensures gentle heat transfer to heat the frying oil so that your chips/crisps are evenly fried. It also prevents the degradation of the oil quality, allowing you the lowest possible oil turnover needed!
