How your fried snacks reach the racks?
Do you have a guilty pleasure? Do you pause while walking down the chips and fried snacks aisle at the supermarket? If the answer to those questions is yes, do you ever wonder about the journey of a raw potato, from a farm up until the crispy crunchy and salty goodness that goes into your mouth? It involves many steps, right from the raw potato input to peeling, slicing and blanching the potato until they are fried and coated with your favourite flavours and spices. With growing competition in the fried snack industry it is important that all of these steps are carried out in a careful and consistent way to produce the highest quality of chips.
From farm to fryer
The availability of raw inputs combined with a high local and global demand provide food processing companies as well as the local farmers many growth opportunities. A regular potato chip plant makes thousands of chips every hour. The potatoes are first washed and de-stoned to ensure they are clean and prevent damage to the peeling and 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 blade. It is then transported into a blancher to reduce the sugar content from the potato slices to prevent the quick dark colouring and maintain product quality. These potatoes slices are then put into a vat of boiling vegetable oil within 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, the 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. It is important that the transportation of your product through the fryer is perfectly done. Every single piece must have the same frying time and no possibility to stay behind and burn. The industrial fryers for the industry of making potato chips is a continuous and fully automated production plant which ensures gentle heat transfer to heat up the frying oil so that that your chips/crisps are evenly fried. It also prevents the degradation of the oil quality allowing you the lowest possible oil turnover needed!
