FDBusiness.com

By Robin Holding, Commercial Director, CPM Wolverine Proctor Ltd

The humble potato is one of the most versatile and flexible root crops known to man – there are hundreds of varieties, all with differing skin colour, flavour and texture, and our ingenuity in terms of what we do with them seems to know no bounds.

The potato on its own can be baked or roasted, cut, sliced/diced or cubed and then boiled, fried or mashed to make something that can be eaten as a snack or as part of virtually any meal, at any time of the day or night. Then there are the derivative products such as potato powder, flake or starches which can be used as they are and mixed into doughs for further processing, or modified to take advantage of their unique properties – indeed, whole industries have sprung up around them, including for applications such as wallpaper paste.

Challenges

This presents a great challenge to the potato R & D teams and, further upstream, to the machinery manufacturers. Clearly, we need to work together to develop new processes and products to be able to satisfy consumer demand, but there can often be a trade-off between what is desirable and what is practical or cost-effective. This is where it is particularly important to develop an effective dialogue between the marketing, R & D and supplier’s engineering personnel, so that ideas can be explored, analysed and then discounted or pursued as appropriate.

CPM Wolverine Proctor Ltd., has been supplying processing machinery to the food industry since early last century and continues to do so on a global basis. We have manufacturing facilities in Europe and the USA and our customers are becoming progressively more reliant on us as a total solution supplier, partly because they have had to reduce their own engineering resources to remain competitive, but also because they value the depth of experience that we have built up over the years. We have product development facilities available in both the UK and USA and we encourage our customers to carry out secure lab trials when developing a new product with us. This can cover everything from extruded snacks to pre-dried fries, roast patties or baked chips.

Project Management and Engineering Resources

In order to meet demand, we have developed our project management and engineering resources, bringing in new design initiatives and process knowledge, allowing us to draw on experiences that may have come from unexpected applications in other industry sectors and enabling us to offer a truly turnkey supply. For all types of foodstuffs, we are able to offer complete plants based on batch or continuous cooking, forming, drying, baking, roasting and toasting. Our recent acquisition of TSA Griddle Systems now enables us to add another dimension to our overall capability with waffles and pancake systems.

At the detailed engineering level, hygiene continues to be a major driving force when developing our design features, benefitting the potato processor in areas such as washdown, cleaning and drainage, minimising downtime and avoiding cross-contamination, energy wastage, etc.

Naturally, we do not profess to manufacture every machine that we supply, but by teaming up with other specialist machinery manufacturers and technologists, we can offer potato processors a “one-stop shop” for everything from raw material handling right through to finished product palletization, all managed by a dedicated project management team.

Preferred Machinery Supplier

Our continuing drive to be the preferred machinery supplier means that we are actively encouraging our customers to talk to us about what they like and dislike, listening to their ideas and identifying the priorities for their business. Only then can we hope to meet and exceed their expectations by supplying them with the optimum solution.

We are proud to be a major supplier to many of the most iconic potato processing companies around the world and we look forward to continued success with them, as well as with new players in the future, whatever their product lines might be, potato-based or otherwise.