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Frozen Foods International News
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| ConAgra Looks to Sweet Potato Boom |
Maybe they're Popeye's second-favorite food ("I yam what I yam")
and, unlike spinach, they can be made into fries. But the trick
is to grow sweet potatoes with a more predictable shape and sugar
content, so that they can be processed as readily as russet potatoes.
ConAgra Foods-Lamb Weston, which last summer announced plans for
the worlds first large-scale sweet potato processing facility in
Louisiana to serve the fast food market, is busy trying to breed
a new generation of the deep orange tubers more suitable for
processing.
Knobby yams aren't ideal for machines designed for russets, and
their color and sweetness aren't uniform. So three years ago,
ConAgra started working with scientists at the Louisiana State
University AgCenter and elsewhere to change some characteristics
of sweet potatoes.
"We're wanting to deliver to [ConAgra's] factory something that
looks like a brick," said, AgCenter researcher Don LaBonte as he
showed a sweet potato shaped more like a croissant at the
research facility in Chase. Louisiana. "We don't want them with
that pretty shape like you get in the grocery store."
"We're witnessing a revolution in the making, not unlike
potatoes" bred to become french fries, said Jan de Weerd, a
potato expert and vice president of global agricultural strategy
and services at ConAgra's Lamb Weston potato-processing unit.
Omaha, Nebraska-based ConAgra is spending $155 million to build
its sweet-potato processing plant in Delhi, La., with the help of
a federal income tax credit and more than $30 million from the
state of Louisiana.
When it opens this fall, ConAgra's first new US plant in years
will turn sweet potatoes into French fries, waffle fries and
other products. H.J. Heinz, McCain Foods and other companies also
produce sweet-potato fries and other products but they use
standard potato-processing plants. ConAgra hopes that new,
improved sweet potatoes will fuel growth and profit in its $2.2
billion potato business as well as with its Healthy Choice and
other retail brands, where sweet potatoes increasingly are part
of the mix.
ConAgra began offering sweet potato products to restaurants in
2001. Sales took off, growing about 50% a year in the last five
years. The national trend to eating healthier helped; sweet
potatoes -- packed with vitamin A and high in fiber -- are widely
perceived as healthier, though when fried it's debatable whether
they are healthier than regular potatoes. Sweet potatoes aren't
actually potatoes, but the roots of a plant. They arent exactly
the same as yams, although the names are often used
interchangeably in the US.
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| 25-May-10 |
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