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Sped-up spuds hit their weights

Tasteful Selections found a way to deliver on a new approach to potatoes, but checkweighers on its packaging lines lacked precision and resulted in overweight bags. Here’s how the company upped its automation to stop giving so much product away.

Combination scales on the mezzanine level drop potatoes into one of the 13 baggers, depending on the potato’s intended size and packaging format. (Photo by Lindsey Tulloch-Tasteful Selections)
Combination scales on the mezzanine level drop potatoes into one of the 13 baggers, depending on the potato’s intended size and packaging format. (Photo by Lindsey Tulloch-Tasteful Selections)

Tasteful Selections LLC, a specialty potato brand consisting of family growers from California, Nevada, and Arizona, is a joint venture of Wisconsin-based farming entities RPE, CSS Farms, and Plover River Farms Alliance Inc. Uniquely, it aims to contemporize the starchy staple to fit modern, busy, on-the-go lifestyles.

Previous generations may have had the time and inclination to cook large, heavy potatoes from scratch to perfection. But whether real or imagined, many of today’s consumers perceive that potatoes involve long cooking times, labor-intensive washing and peeling of thicker-skinned spuds, and a requisite amount of culinary skill to elevate them beyond the baked-for-an-hour variety. Also, consumers who aren’t cooking for themselves every day are prone to waste portions of the traditional 20-lb sack of potatoes. When a staple food is known for sprouting roots in the back of a pantry due to lack of use, that only reinforces negative perceptions.

Since its inception in 2010, Tasteful Selections has sought to push potatoes into the 21st century. For instance, its bite-sized baby and fingerling potatoes, which are its largest volume items, are pre-washed, don’t require peeling, and have faster cook times than traditional Russet potatoes. And microwavable products and varieties, including Take & Shake single-serve cups, Season & Savor family trays, SteamPak Minis, and even mini sweet potatoes, further interject speed, convenience, and relative ease-of-use into potato-forward dishes. The company even markets around the concept of rescued moments, hashtagged for Twitter, celebrating time savings in the kitchen as a means to find more personal and family time.

“And everything we do is whole potatoes, with their skins. It’s just that we tend to do very small potatoes,” says Nathan Bender, Vice President of Plant Operations. “We transformed the baby potato business in the U.S. to give our customers more offerings. We do reds, yellows, whites, medleys, purples, in all different types of packaging, starting in as small a format as a 5-ounce single-serve cup.”

Packaging formats
Bite-sized potatoes are differentiated into marble-sized one-bite, ping pong ball-sized two-bite, and golf ball-sized three-bite varieties. Package formats depend on the potato sizes, including 24-oz one-bite, 28-oz two-bite, and 40-oz three-bite polyethylene film packages. In Leno mesh polypropylene bags, 24-oz one-bite and 28-oz two-bite varieties are available, and slightly larger fingerlings come in 28-oz packages. The company does some bulk bagging in 10-, 20-, and 50-lb formats, though that trend, largely for meal kits, is slowing.

New packs that have yet to be heavily automated—but won’t stay that way—include the SteamPak Minis. These single-serve potatoes in a carton are designed to compete with overwrapped Russet potatoes available at supermarkets.

“The theory behind this product is if a customer was going to pick up an overwrapped Russet for their lunch, he could instead pick up this single-serve item,” Bender says. “It would be the same area of the store, and be sold at a similar price, but it would have the benefits of a skin-on, flavorful potato. The flavor is really the big difference there versus a Russet. The skin is where most of your nutrients are in a potato, and a lot of people don’t eat the skin of a Russet.”

Still, the largest volume is in the aforementioned bagged bite-sized to fingerling potato formats. So, that means a lot of vertical bagging at the company’s Arvin, CA, location, which is central for its constituent growers. The company now has 13 total packaging lines, 11 of which are bagging lines, plus two bulk fill lines.

Evolving into uniform scales
“Tasteful Selections had started in a smaller facility in 2010, and we originally were using a certain type of checkweigher. We just always struggled with those, both with speed and accuracy,” Bender says. “We had Yamato scales feeding the bagger, and those were great, but this other brand of checkweigher downstream from the bagger just wasn’t doing the job.”

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