National Post (National Edition)
Where have all the fries gone? Cold storage
Simultaneously crisp and tender, steamy and salty, it’s hard to beat french fries fresh from the fryer. Delivery fries, like homemade oven fries, just aren’t the same. It’s only natural that proper french fries would be up there on many people’s lists of most-missed foods during lockdown.
Our collective longing makes it all the more painful to know that around 200 million pounds — more than 90 million kilograms — of Canadian french fry potatoes are stuck in storage.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, with so many people gravitating towards comfort food cooking, frenchfried potatoes have become a slow mover. With many restaurants across the country closed due to COVID-19 — where three-quarters of Canadian potatoes are usually eaten — the market for fries has diminished dramatically.
French-fry potatoes are a special breed of spud, larger and more elongated than the varieties commonly available in the produce sections at your local grocers. Their raison d’être is to be cut into batons and packed into bags for food service. They were bred and grown specifically for the fryer.
Regular potatoes and potato chips alike have been flying off the shelves during the pandemic, says Kevin MacIsaac, general manager of the United Potato Growers of Canada. Sales of potato chips are up about 23 per cent compared to last year, and people are buying “substantially” more fresh table potatoes as well. But frenchfry potatoes are on the other end of the sales spectrum. There’s a big difference between the volume of fries typically sold at quick-service restaurants across the country, MacIsaac says, and the number of orders being placed today through drivethrus and delivery apps.
As a result of the diminished demand from restaurants, millions of pounds of potatoes are at risk of being thrown away. Planting for the 2020 harvest has been reduced, MacIsaac says, and processing companies have told farmers to store their french-fry potatoes until there’s a need for them again. Quick-frozen, they could easily last for a year, explains MacIsaac, but low consumption, coupled with the fact that more potatoes are coming in the fall, means space “is a major issue.”
A similar situation in Belgium has led to a request many on this side of the Atlantic would be more than willing to oblige. With nearly 750,000 tons of potatoes at risk of being wasted, Belgian farmers are asking people to eat fries twice a week.
“We’re working with supermarkets to see whether we can launch a campaign asking Belgians to do something for the sector by eating fries — especially frozen fries — twice a week during the coronavirus crisis,” Romain Cools of growers’ union Belgapom told CNBC. “What we are trying to do is to avoid food waste, because every lost potato is a loss.”
MacIsaac applauds the effort, but given the volume of Canadian potatoes that need to find fryers, putting a dent in the surplus is a daunting task that will likely take more than a twice-weekly commitment from Canadian potato lovers. The average farm can store roughly eight million pounds (3.6 million kilograms) of spuds, he emphasizes — that’s 80,000 10-pound bags of potatoes.