City Slickers

No Small Potatoes

An Edmonton-based company is making big business out of little spuds

Story by Jennifer Cockrall-King

As I close my eyes and inhale deeply, I swear I'm standing in a homesteader's root cellar. It's cool, low-lit and the earthy smell is pure garden-after-a-morning-rain. I'm flanked by aisles of wooden crates brimming with golf ball-sized red, indigo-blue and yellow-skinned potatoes that reach at least two storeys above my head. This is the receiving area where baby potatoes arrive at The Little Potato Company in the west end of Edmonton. They come from as close as Spruce Grove and as far away as Washington and California, depending on the season. In the next area, the large washing, sorting and packaging equipment is noisily whirring away in the centre of the warehouse. Forklifts whisk crates and boxes to and fro. In a matter of days, these potatoes will be sent off to grocery stores all across Canada and the U.S.

Amazingly enough, all this began as a casual conversation in the mid-1990s across a kitchen table in Edmonton. Jacob van der Schaaf, who grew up on a potato farm in Holland, wondered aloud to his daughter, Angela Santiago: "Why aren't potatoes small in Canada like they are in Europe?" That small mystery was the spark of a big idea.

In 1996, Angela and her father borrowed an acre of land near Edmonton from a family friend and planted it with a few European varieties. They harvested the potatoes when they were small and tender, and sold them clean and ready to cook to delis, specialty grocers, and their first big account, the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. When they couldn't keep up with the demand early on, they knew they were onto something. Angela is now managing director and one of six shareholders in this Edmonton-based company. Her father travels the world sourcing and collecting potato varieties for his research and development company, Tuberosum Technologies. The other shareholders are Gary, Dave and Andy Haarsma and Wes Visser.

The business has come a long way since Angela delivered that first load of potatoes to the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in her small red car. The Little Potato Company now ships baby gourmet potatoes - which range from a minimum of 3/4" (19 mm) to a max of 1 5/8" (41 mm) in diameter - all across Canada to major grocery chains, such as Save-On-Foods, Loblaws, Safeway and Costco. In late 2006, they landed the contract to package baby potatoes under the President's Choice label. In the past few years, they have expanded south of the border into the Pacific Northwest.

Of course there were growing pains, Angela tells me. Under certain conditions in Alberta, potatoes can outgrow their "smallness" in a day, so she and her partners had to learn to plant with a different mindset than other potato farmers. Gourmet potatoes are about value, not volume. Her "little company" also kept outgrowing its office and warehouse spaces, so she had to keep finding bigger spaces and hiring more staff.

And then there were the regulatory headaches, especially early on. Angela cites the year-long process to win approval from government regulators to sell potatoes in one and two-pound bags. Until 1996, the minimum size of potatoes that could be packed was a three-pound bag. (It made sense, as potatoes generally weighed in at about one potato per pound.) It took a written proposal and a year of phone calls to be able to pack their potatoes in smaller bags. And it was only in 2000 that The Little Potato Company could finally pack multiple varieties in the same bag. She also had to re-educate produce managers at the stores. These potatoes need to be treated differently than the large bakers and creamers. Freshly dug and washed, they are perishable and need to be kept cool.

So what's the big deal with baby potatoes? First and foremost, the taste is different. Baby potatoes haven't had time to convert their sugars fully into starch, so the result is a sweeter tuber and the texture is smoother and crisper than the large, more mature spuds. Without dirt and with thin and tender skins, they need to be kept in a dark, cool place, like a refrigerator, at the store and at home. They can't be treated like the big potatoes and piled in mounds at the back of the produce section.

Quality control manager Diana Ciungan, who was my guide through the warehouse on this day, points out various varieties of potatoes as they travel from receiving area to packaging line. ¡°Baby boomers,¡± she shouts over the staccato pneumatic noise of the sorting line. "These are very good for mashed potatoes," she smiles, holding up a knobbly yellow potato. "Piccolo," she calls out as we pass the packaging line, where straw-coloured potatoes are whipping through bagging machines before being packed into cardboard boxes for shipping. "These are good for frying or in salads."

After being sized at the farm, the potatoes are washed and dried in a huge, revolving drum. Teams of workers carefully survey the conveyor belts as they move along. Any that aren't quite round enough or have blemishes are culled. I'm pleased to find out that odd-shaped potatoes go to the food bank. Others that don't make the cut for the food bank are put aside for farmers, who can come to the warehouse and pick up the rejected potatoes for free to use as cow feed.

On the packaging line, small reds called Blushing Belles are getting sealed at lightning speed in their bags and placed by hand into boxes for shipping. I take a better look at the alluring packages, with their smart, playful graphics and see-through windows that show off their petite size and freshly cleaned sheen. The Little Potato Company also packages organic baby potatoes and two varieties of French potatoes: the oblong yellow Amandines and the red-skinned, yellow-fleshed Cheries. The company has come up with some of these names to help with the marketing of their potatoes, but it's hard to deny the power of a good package with nice, clean produce peeking out from within. I find myself envisioning a bowl of steamed baby potatoes covered with fresh dill and melting butter on my dinner table tonight.

I also find out that despite the dark and cool receiving and shipping areas (5ºC and darkness are optimal conditions in which potatoes should be stored), these potatoes don't spend more than a few days at the company warehouse anyway.

Diana tells me that they have the capacity to wash and pack spuds for a full 10-hour day and they usually run at full tilt. When the potatoes leave the warehouse, the transport trucks must maintain an even 4 to 6ºC right to the grocery stores.

The Little Potato Company has grown from a one-acre experiment to a transnational company with 45 employees, and Angela Santiago is convinced that there is still more territory to cover.

Convenience is a big factor for her retail customers, she says, and as a working mother of four, she knows a thing or two about the importance of convenience. She's currently working on microwavable and steam-packs for her potatoes, already a major trend in Europe. Though the spuds will stay small, The Little Potato Company is just going to keep growing.

Click here for recipe of Cherie Potatoes with Braised Fennel