Who wants to learn about packaging french fries! Nobody? Too bad!

It's time for WarPig's TMI story hour!

I've worked in the packaging equipment industry since 1987 (yeah, I'm old), and much of it has been for french fries. As far as french fry plants go, I've designed and built baggers, case openers, and case packers - much of it for Lamb Weston (the other big companies in the USA and Canada are McCain Foods, Simplot, and Ore Ida - and we've built machines for all of them). As a matter of fact, I worked on a Lamb Weston project today. This is why I'm really surprised that I haven't heard this news before now.

A lot of the individual packaging lines package nothing but unlabeled retail bags that get sent out to restaurants, and these bags look like brown paper bags. Of course there are things that make the paper itself challenging - one, the grease can't soak through the bag, and two, the bag needs to be able to be sealed quickly and securely with heat.

As far as creating the bag goes, the baggers for the retail bags (usually 6lbs. per bag), run at around 50-60 bags per minute. So, you need to be able to seal the bag, fill it with 6lbs. of product, and have the seal cool down enough to support the weight of the product without bursting open - all within one second. So, this is why they can't just use paper - it has to be coated with something that's food-safe but melts together to form a strong bond.

One of the reasons this new paper is interesting to me (and probably no one else here ) is that it must already work with existing baggers, because if it didn't, I definitely would have already known about it. Back in the day when trans-fats were banned, the new oils would soak through the paper, and the new paper the industry came up with didn't seal like the old paper. So they had to keep working on that while equipment manufacturers worked on new sealing jaws.

If you want to get a feel for the scale of french fry production... around 15 years ago, we built one of our case packers and leased it to a french fry plant. We were a newish company at the time and the customer didn't want to commit to more than the one machine without proof that we knew what we were doing. We had a counter in the program to let both the customer and us know what the machine had done in a year. All this machine does is pack six, 6 lb. bags into a cardboard box - so, 36 lbs. of fries per box. After a year, that one machine had packed over one million cases. The customer ended up buying that machine and ordered four more, and that's just one packaging line in that one plant. So yeah, that's a lot of spuds!