10 things you might not know about the potato

The not so humble tattie and its origins

28 February 2021

Our mission year-round is to supply you, our customer, with really fresh chips, ready for you to cook to perfection.

You save on the prep and the waste management and can focus on your own happy customers!

That all starts with the perfect chip, which begins with the perfect chipping potato… so we thought you’d like to learn a little more about the not so humble (in our opinion) potato.

• What you might already know is that potatoes originate in the Americas. In fact wild potatoes originate in what is now part of Peru.
• Between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago these wild potatoes were first cultivated! Varieties then began to spread across South America.
• It was the Spanish who first imported potatoes into Europe, with the first samples arriving in the 16th
• The potato had now become the world’s fourth largest annual food crop (after maize, wheat and rice).
• There are now more than 5,000 varieties of potato and 99% of them stem from a variety that first grew in Chile.
• Scotland has become a key grower of seed potatoes and supplies many markets around the world. This is because our climate is very suitable and we have very few problems with virus diseases.
• In the UK, the most popular potatoes for making chips are either Maris Piper or King Edwards.
• All our chipping potatoes are grown here in the UK apart from a brief period in the summer when we may need to source from Spain till the British harvest comes in.
• Potatoes are tubers, which means they are where the parent plant (posh name Solanum tuberosum) stores nutrients.
• Potato peel – the skin - is starchy because the plant uses the starch as a way to store energy. But our own Peel Tech system means we never have starch-blocked drains, despite peeling thousands of kilos of potatoes every week… and you always get the perfect chipping potato.

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