Turn Potato Variability Into Profit
Consistent quality starts with understanding your raw materials. For potato processors, natural variation can lead to excess oil pickup, off-spec color or moisture levels that miss the mark, at any stage of production.
Process NIR technology provides real-time data on moisture, reducing sugars, starch and oil at every critical point, helping you make timely adjustme
nts that protect margins and reduce waste.
The potential impact:
- $175,000 in annual savings from a 0.5% reduction in oil absorption
- $230,000 in yearly profit gains by reducing off-spec product from 3% to 2%
- $66,000 recovered annually by preventing over-drying
Discover how Perten's DA 7250 benchtop or DA 7440 on-line,analyzers deliver actionable insights in seconds, so you can act before issues affect production.
Achieve More Consistent Production, Improved ROI and Reduced Waste
Perten’s NIR solutions, including the at-line DA 7250 benchtop NIR and the online DA 7440, turn potato variability into predictable value and yield. Our user friendly solutions deliver actionable data for key parameters such as moisture, reducing sugars, starch, and oil at critical production decision points (intake, blancher, fryer, dryer), enabling instant adjustments that cut oil pickup, trim energy usage, reduce scrap, and ensure you hit color/texture targets. With rugged, designs and available connections to existing plant systems, potato processors get faster payback, steadier throughput, and consistent margins across shifts and sites
Where Process NIR Fits Across the Value Chain
Intake Sorting
Facilitate optimal incoming raw material sorting by obtaining accurate moisture/ dry matter, reducing sugars and starch values to identify the ideal potatoes for each final product application.
Blanching/Frying
Continue to monitor sugar content to optimize blanch time and temperature to reduce sugars and stabilize color. After blanching, real-time moisture screening enables fryer settings to be adjusted and post-fryer belt speeds and temperatures to be auto-trimmed to keep color and fat percentages in spec.
Drying/Dehydrating
Ensuring efficient and in spec drying is critical to maximizing ROI and achieving a consistent end product. NIR sensors can be installed before dryers to feed information forward, as well as after dryers to ensure products exiting the dryer are within tight acceptable windows for final moisture content.
Seasoning
Inconsistent seasoning is a common, yet preventable, customer complaint. Monitoring oil content before seasoning application, as well as seasoning pickup, will ensure conformance to brand standards and reduction in waste.
Packaging
A final product analysis before packaging is critical to ensure that your product meets the finished product specifications. Whether taking grab samples to test each batch, or continuously monitoring with process NIR sensors, failing to test is too risky.
From Potato to Profit, in Real Time
Small improvements in process control can deliver significant savings – here's how processors are putting NIR to work.
By selecting the right potatoes at intake, a chip manufacturer reduced oil absorption by just 0.5%, saving 600 pounds of oil per day. That small change added up to over $175,000 in annual savings.
Installing DA 7440 sensors at key points in production helped one frozen potato processor cut off-spec products from 3% to 2%. With 200,000 pounds produced each day, that improvement delivered more than $230,000 in yearly profit gains.
A potato flake producer used NIR to stop over-drying their product. By maintaining the target 7% moisture level instead of 6.5%, they recovered 250 pounds of product every day—worth over $66,000 annually.
