From the land to the shop
To turn our organic ingredients into delicious chips requires a number of carefully managed steps. The story starts in the polder farmland: with the growers and farmers we work with. These people are the first link in our quality chain: their knowledge and expertise are essential to the quality of our chips.
Straight from the land
From sowing to planting to cultivating the crops: everything is done according to the strict demands of organic agriculture. The products that we do not source from the polder but for instance from Germany, Belgium and France, have the same top organic quality. We agree beforehand on the crop variety: for potato it is usually the Agria, for beets we choose the Pablo, for parsnip we use the Javelin, and for sweet potato it’s the Beauregard. We also make agreements on the quantities and the time of harvesting and delivery.
Check and double-check
After the potatoes and vegetables are delivered to us, we conduct an extra check to make sure they meet all the specifications. We clean the potatoes in-house, before slicing them to the desired thickness. Vegetables have already been cleaned and selected and sometimes sliced by the supplier, ready to be fried.
How we fry our chips
We fry our potatoes and vegetables in two different ways. The first way is by continuous frying, which means that the potato or vegetable slices pass through the frying oil on a kind of conveyor belt. The other frying process is call ‘batch cooked’, which means that the chips are fried in separate batches. Here, the frying time is of the essence, and is part of the taste makers’ secret. Only they know how to achieve that typical, crispy texture.
Exactly according to recipe
Since our assortment consists of many sorts of chips, we use many different recipes. Each recipe prescribes a choice for continuous frying or batch cooked, for vegetable or potato, or for one of our delicious combined varieties. We measure out precise portions of four different products on conveyor belts, which eventually end up at the herbs unit. Here the chips are mixed and flavoured with organic herbs or salt, and for a number of varieties we also add dried fruits.
Pack and go!
To weigh the right amount of chips for our bags, we use so-called multi-head weighing scales. These catch the mixes in 14 different trays and measure just the right volume. From there the chips slide into the pre-printed bags. A tiny bit of nitrogen is added to keep the chips fresh and the bags inflated. The bags are then packed in boxes and stacked on pallets, ready to be transported to shops all across Europe.