The International Year of the Potato – a potato is not just a potato.

AS Wilcox and Sons was started by John Wilcox’s grandfather Syd and one of his sons Lex, who is now chairman of the board. They started growing in the 1930s and formed AS Wilcox and Sons in 1954.

John is the third generation to be working in the business, which uses a business model with family shareholding. There are 220 full time staff across the whole business, which includes potatoes, onions, carrots, and persimmons etc.

About 500,000 tonnes of potatoes are grown in New Zealand, and the Wilcox family grows 35,000 tonnes. They are not the biggest, but they are a major player in the fresh market and also grow for processing.

About 60% of the potatoes grown in NZ are processed, and many of these are exported.

About potatoes and why they are so good for you:

John Wilcox: “We are trying to increase consumption to sell the benefits of potatoes as a food product rather than as a carbohydrate source, and alongside that recognize potatoes are not just carbohydrates, they contain minerals and nutrients. And most New Zealanders don’t realize that potatoes given them half their daily requirements of Vitamin C. Putting all this together, along with the satiety factor (the feeling of being full – when you eat a potato it adds to your feeling of fullness, so you don’t eat as much) makes a great food package.

As a nation we are eating more widely and our taste buds are changing. But all our rice is imported and getting more expensive, it has trebled in price in six months. A lot of wheat comes into NZ in the form of pasta, or already milled.

Internationally the focus on potatoes is about them being a better way to utilize resources: you can eat more of the crop.

Potatoes have nil saturated fat. About 85% of the potato is water, which is comparable to 50% of cereal plants.”

John puts it this way: it takes ¾ of a bath of water to grow 1kg of potatoes, it takes 5 baths of water to grow 1kg of wheat and 30 baths of water to grow 1kg of rice.

He also talked about glycaemic index (GI), which is a way to measure the effect of the particular carbohydrate on blood glucose levels.

But he said the glycaemic load of carbohydrates was a better way to measure this. Because of the high percentage of water in potatoes, they had a lower glycaemic load than pasta, which is considered to be a low GI food.

People tend to follow hobby horses in food trends based on one single feature and foods get painted as bad or good.

He says instead there should be a balance of food types, and a consideration of how much you eat.

2008 International Year of the Potato

A potato is not just a potato he says. There is now a tremendous variety of potatoes, and not all potatoes are suitable for all purposes. Plus consumers have become more demanding and want to pay for a product that does what it says it will do.

They still sell potatoes with dirt on them – because some people think they are fresher – but 70% of their retail sales are washed potatoes. Most people don’t want to pay for dirt.

Potatoes used to be sold in 20kg bags, and you could only buy Rua or Illam Hardy.

Now there are more and more varieties coming on and we would have 20 different varieties being trialed for processing and the fresh market.

Potatoes for processing and the fresh market are very different: processing potatoes are driven by size, sugar content (the lower the better for fries), dry matter and yield.

In the fresh market in the past it has been about products that look good.

That’s where the next revolution in potatoes is coming from: good looking potatoes aren’t necessarily the best performing.

Nadine has dominated the market because it looks good. But it is pretty watery.

There are better choices around now, the idea of being fit for particular use rather than saying that it looks good so I will buy it.

Varieties that John loves: we grow a couple of salad varieties and market them as Perlas in a box; (the box came out of Oamaru where the growers have the old variety Jersey Benne) the two salad varieties are Tiffany and Annabel.

At the moment Red Jackets, a red skinned gold fleshed potato is pretty good.

We have a test kitchen to make sure if we say something is a roasting potato that it roasts.

www.aswilcox.co.nz

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