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Snyder of Berlin cares, and the Somerset County company takes the time to monitor the 'gravity' of its potatoes. A higher specific gravity means less water and more solid material to give a higher production yield when potatoes are sliced and fried.
About 25 pounds of chips are produced from 100 pounds of potatoes. That's because potatoes are 80 percent water. So it takes about four pounds of raw potatoes to make one pound of potato chips.
General Manager David R. Ray said Snyder of Berlin uses many different varieties of potatoes, but the most common are Snowden and Atlantic types.
'We grow a lot of Snowden around here, and they store real well. Atlantic makes for really good potato chips, but they don't keep as well. You have to make chips out of them a couple of days after they're pulled out of the ground,' Ray said.
Potatoes come to the factory in trailers, loaded into a dumper, then shipped by conveyor into the building. The dumper can unload a 45,000-pound trailer full of raw potatoes in less than 40 minutes.
About five trailers full of potatoes are delivered daily. Potatoes can be stored for six months. The storage area at Snyder is environmentally controlled at 55 degrees and 85 percent humidity.
All potatoes are washed then travel to the fryers via a pressurized water system. Snyder of Berlin uses 130,000 gallons of water daily - which is 35 million gallons annually.
Potatoes that are too large have to be cut by hand by a 'peeler,' who uses a sharp knife to slice and 'size' them for fryers. Their journey continues into an automatic peeling machine that feeds two continuous frying machines and a pair of kettle fryers.
Regular Snyder potato chips are cut to a thickness of 56 thousandths of an inch and are cooked in a peanut-soybean oil blend at 390 degrees. After frying, chips are run through a salter and conveyor where an optical sorter discards chips with defects and discoloration - routing smaller chips to small bags and larger chips to bigger bags.
Kettle chips are thicker, sliced between 65 and 68 thousandths of an inch. Snyder kettle chips spend 10 to 12 minutes in the fryer, while regular chips cook for about 4.5 minutes. Kettle chips are fried in 100 percent peanut oil.
Snyder of Berlin has a separate snack room for cheese curls, which are made from corn meal mixed with water and fed into a device known as an extruder. Under extreme pressure, the meal is turned into a semi-solid material.
This material is then forced through a small opening, a process that creates enough heat to enlarge the corn into a collet, which is then baked and spiked with cheese flavoring.
David Smith, facilities manager, said the plant's extrusion line produces 13,000 pounds of product in one hour, and business is up 13 percent over last year.
