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

Nation's Restaurant News,  May 17, 1999  by David Graulich

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

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."