Aroostook County potatoes go high-tech

High-tech potatoes sounds like an oxymoron. And in an age of million-transistor silicon chips, the Naturally Potatoes plant in Mars Hill is far from mind-boggling. But the operation is state-of-the-art, not only in terms of producing refrigerated potatoes, but in terms of being an energy-efficient manufacturing facility.

It was designed by engineers at the Portland, Ore.-based Food Group, a unit of CH2M Hill’s Industrial Design Corp. Upfront engineering costs were more than $1 million, according to Naturally Potatoes president Rodney McCrum. Total initial investment was in “double-digit” millions, McCrum said. The cost to build the plant from the ground up today would be close to $50 million.

The plant recycles 40 percent of the more than 100,000 gallons of water used each day. The nitrogen-rich outflow irrigates crops in the spring and summer. In the winter, it is aerated into a mist at a site a mile from the plant. The process depletes the nitrogen and the water returns to the ground as snow.

On the outside, the plant is a standard issue sheet metal building. Inside, it is a clockwork of conveyors and process and packaging machines. Workers in white lab coats and hard hats monitor gauges, tap away at control terminals or double-check package weights.

Electric eyes search for blemishes on potato pieces. Precise blasts of compressed air knock the ugly spuds out of the line.

“If we were a noncomputerized operation, we would have to have 250 to 300 people,” McCrum said. “But it wouldn’t pay the wages we are paying.”

In the automated loading dock area, varieties of potatoes float in vast steel bins. Already mechanically washed and peeled, they wait for stainless steel pipes to siphon them up into the factory. On a steel catwalk above the bins, McCrum taps twice on a computer touch screen. The screen changes to a flow control display – a map of the overall system. Radar blips on the map track each batch of potatoes as it makes its way through the plant.

McCrum taps the screen again. It reverts to columns of numbers. It’s not a matter of having toys to play with, he said, it’s all about the bottom line.

“We live in a competitive world,” he said. “We think we are the lowest-cost producer of our product in the country.”