FoodTrust - Connections

Just for fun here’s a little video I found, inspired by The Lord of the Rings.

Potatoes, used as a cheap and plentiful source of nourishment, haven’t changed much in thousands of year. What can you possibly do to add value to such a basic vegetable?

That was a question we asked ourselves about five years ago. “What can we do to add value to such an inexpensive commodity that will produce greater returns to farmers?” The first thing we did was to ask what you wanted as a potato purchaser.

You told us that you wanted greater convenience. You wanted potatoes that cooked evenly, didn’t require a lot of washing, and you didn’t want to have to sort through a bag to weed out the biggest or smallest, bruised or otherwise bad ones.

You also told us you didn’t really know how to cook potatoes. Sure, you knew you could cook them in boiling water, then either leave them as is or mash them. But, you wanted to know which variety produced the very best mashed potato, or the best baked potato.

You told us you would be willing to pay more for potatoes that met your criteria for THE perfect potato.

So, we went about setting standards that growers and packers could use to make sure your potatoes were consistently sized and free of most defects. We partnered with the Culinary Institute of Canada and spent two years researching which potato varieties were best suited for each cooking method. We changed a regular, everyday, humdrum potato from an unexceptional commodity item into something that would achieve consistent results from one meal to the next.

In the process, we created an opportunity for farmers to increase the income they receive from their crop. Why is that important? Why should you care about how much money a farmer makes? That’s a topic for another post.

Later,

Scott