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'Industrialized Fries': A handshake leads to the modern fry - Transcript

Nation's Restaurant News - May 17, 1999

The following excerpt was taken from "French Fry Companion," to be published this month by Lebhar-Friedman Books.

The deal was done with a handshake after a day of schmoozing and horseback riding on a spacious ranch near Santa Barbara, Calif. The two deal-makers had much in common. Both were selfmade entrepreneurs who didn't have college degrees or establishment connections, but who combined extraordinary vision with the resolve and nerves of professional gamblers. Both were in the later years of middle age. Both had built careers and companies by proving the experts wrong in the unglamorous sectors of the food business.

The two men were Ray Krocand Jack Simplot, and the year was 1967. Many years after their handshake, Timothy Egan in The New York Times described that fateful day in Southern California: "The king of fast-food hamburgers and the patriarch of potatoes came together for a meeting that would change the American meal and create a new breed of corporate farmer. ... Kroc and Simplot forged a deal to make the perfect french fried potatoes -- upright, bright, cheap and free of molds. They would look the same whether they were sold on the Jersey shore or in a drive-thru in Idaho.

Simplot told a reporter from Nation's Restaurant News in 1997 that the agreement was struck along these lines:

KROC: "Okay, Jack, build me a plant, and I'll put these stores on just as fast as you can deliver them."

SIMPLOT: "By golly, boy. Let's get going."

"On the basis of that handshake of burgers and fries," said author George Gilder in his book, "Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise," "Simplot rushed home and launched a facility in Heyburn, Idaho, that could produce 30,000 pounds of fries an hour."

The Kroc-Simplot handshake marked the beginning of the industrialized-fries epoch. Up to that point french fries were a popular food that had to be stored laboriously, cooked and served on-the-spot by employees with limited training. Quality varied wildly, from crisp, golden, savory fries to soggy, rectangular yellow mush. Frozen french fries were still a theoretical dream. McDonald's was so disappointed with the taste, appearance and texture of frozen fries that its senior executives recoiled in horror at the thought of messing around with their most profitable product.

Food writer Brad A. Johnson describes the antediluvian, everything-from-scratch era, when some 140 local grocers made deliveries to individual McDonald's restaurants: "Back then, McDonald's restaurants brought Russet potatoes in 100-pound sacks and fed them to bulky, low-tech machines that continuously peeled and sliced the tubers. Fry cooks blanched the potatoes in hot fat, then finished them in small batches as they were needed. Aside from the use of automated peelers, this wasn't a revolutionary cooking process, but rather a good idea borrowed from European street-vendors, transformed into an American restaurant phenomenon."

After McDonald's went public in 1965, Kroc was worried about fries. Inability to mass produce a quality fry -- one that could match the consistency of McDonald's hamburger -- would be the major impediment to the rapid growth needed to keep Wall Street happy.

That was the impetus for a fried version of the Manhattan Project to find an edible, depend able, economical frozen fry. As journalist John F. Love commented in his book, "McDonald's: Behind the Arches": "McDonald's began researching potato frying the way pharmaceutical companies research new drugs. ... What at first appeared to be a simple task soon seemed akin to unlocking the secrets of the atom."

McDonald's researchers wrestled with technical problems that resulted, in Love's words, from "the fundamental aversion potatoes have to being frozen." The temperature settings on fryers didn't accurately depict the real temperature of frying oils in the vats. When a cold mass of potatoes was dropped into the oil, the temperatures would decline sharply. Some flyers would recover more quickly than others; the temperature would reset at different levels in different fryers. Ice crystals formed inside the potatoes during the freezing process, making the fries soggy, damp and greasy-looking when cooked.

Into that dilemma strode Simplot. The son of Idaho farmers, he started making money from unconventional ideas at the age of 14. His mode of operation was to go into debt, gamble on an unproved product that big competitors wouldn't touch, create it in volume, drive down unit costs and then wait for the demand to follow. Simplot believed that supply would create its own demand.

"That ethereal voice in the movie 'Field of Dreams' -- 'Build it and they will come' -- was describing Simplot's business philosophy as he jumped from scrap metal to onions to hogs to land to potatoes. 'I ain't no economist,' Simplot told an employee, 'but I got eyes to see.'

"During World War II Simplot built the world's largest potato dehydration plant to feed American troops. George Gilder described the wartime effort made by Simplot's enterprises: 'To get more spuds, he bought and cleared several new potato farms. To get more shipping boxes, he bought lumber mills and built box factories. To dispose of endless potato skins and eyes and spouts, he built a feedlot for some 3,500 hogs. To get fertilizer for soil wilted by too many potato crops, he bought mineral rights on 2,500 acres of phosphate-rich territory."

After the war, Simplot received the Army-Navy "F" medal, given for excellent industrial performance.

Potato consumption declined during the 1950s, and Simplot sought ways to expand volume. He had one unsuccesful go-around with McDonald's, when he put $400,000 of his own money into an experimental cold-storage system for Russet potatoes. The system failed, and the potatoes rotted, but McDonald's was impressed by his gamble.

Based on the handshake with Kroc, Simplot anted up $3.5 million to build a plant for the breakthrough frozen-french-fry process -- which had yet to be discovered. Years after the deal Simplot reminisced: "I figured, hell, if the old man [Kroc] didn't take these fries, I would expand the plant for myself. It gave me a good excuse to build the kind of frozen french fries plant I wanted."

The gamble paid off. Researchers at McDonald's and Simplot discovered a process that eliminated the destructive effects of freezing by drying the prefrozen fry with air and then putting it through a rapid frying cycle before freezing. The principle that evolved was simple: Do less cooking in the store and more cooking during production. The new process reduced the moisture while retaining the crispness of the fry.

Thus began the explosive growth of the frozen fry. By 1972 McDonald's had converted completely to frozen potatoes and had broken away from the rest of the fast-food industry. The fry volume became so immense that Simplot couldn't handle it all. Today Simplot provides about one-half of McDonald's fries. Several large companies compete with him in the frozen-fry business, such as Ore-Ida, McCain, Nestle, and Lamb Weston. F. Gilbert Lamb, a founder of Lamb Weston, invented the formidable Lamb Water Gun Knife, a high-pressure system that hurls potatoes at a speed of 117 feet per second through sharpened steel blades, converting the whole potato into sliced french fries with astonishing efficiency.

As for Simplot, he went on to grow Simplot into a diversified agricultural company. He also made another fortune in high technology by putting up $1 million in seed money for Micron Technology, a semi-conductor company. At the age of 89, he still can be seen discussing crop prices and weather conditions with his friends at Elmer's Pancake House in Boise, Idaho. You may see his car in Elmer's parking lot -- it's the Lincoln Continental with the license plate "MR SPUD."

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