CALGARY – There’s more to potatoes than deciding if they should be baked, mashed or fried.
And people in the growing industry are busy finding new ways to prepare the centuries-old staple.
The growth is driven mainly by the processing sector which turns spuds into fries and snack foods.
In Canada, the average person eats about 22 kilograms of potatoes each year as table potatoes, chips and fries.
And that’s puny compared to what the Americans gobble, said John Vanderberg of Agriculture Canada during a recent Potato Association of America meeting in Calgary.
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This year the United States planted 1.4 million acres, an increase from last year’s 1.38 million acres. The preliminary estimate for the 1994 Canadian potato acreage is 329,6000, up from last year’s 316,100 acres.
It’s a tough world out there as Canadians fight to sell more product on the world market as well as convince people at home to eat more spuds.
Pat Shimbashi, owner of Diamond S Foods potato farm of Taber, Alta., said Canadians know how to grow potatoes, they just need help marketing.
Competing against American potatoes isn’t easy. From May to July each year, Albertans face an onslaught of 10,000 tonnes of new California potatoes. When this fresh product arrives in stores Shimbashi watches as people willingly pay $4.29 for a 4.5 kilogram bag of American potatoes and bypass the local product that sells for $1.29.
The local quality is as good or better than imports, but potato growers have to work harder to convince Canadian consumers, he said.
At Lethbridge’s York Farms more than 100 million pounds of potatoes are grown each year, mostly for processing.
Bill Sanford of Maple Leaf Foods, which owns York Farms, said the focus for processing potatoes may not necessarily be the standard french fry or hash browns.
“The North American population has grown too accustomed to boiled, mashed and french fried potatoes. All of us in the industry have to educate consumers and demonstrate to them that not only are potatoes highly nutritional foods but highly flexible as well.”
