ConAgra Pushes Sweet Potato to Straighten Up and Fry Right

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ConAgra Pushes Sweet Potato to Straighten Up and Fry Right

CHASE, La.—The deep orange vegetables sprouting at an agricultural research station here are the root of ConAgra Foods Inc.'s biggest bet in years: an effort to reinvent the lowly sweet potato for mass consumption, starting with its shape and sugar content.

For decades, sweet potatoes have been a holiday favorite. In the past decade, they've popped up increasingly at restaurants catering to diners eager for something new.

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Ilan Brat/The Wall Street Journal

LSU AgCenter breeder Don LaBonte with two sweet-potato varieties.
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ConAgra hopes to make the sweet potato a modern-day equivalent of its stepbrother, the russet potato. In the mid-1940s, entrepreneur J. R. Simplot developed the frozen French fry, thus elevating the russet from kitchen staple to multibillion-dollar franchise.

Alas, knobby yams aren't ideal for machines designed for russets, and their color and sweetness aren't uniform. So three years ago, ConAgra started working with scientists at the Louisiana State University AgCenter and elsewhere to change some characteristics of sweet potatoes.

"We're wanting to deliver to [ConAgra's] factory something that looks like a brick," says AgCenter researcher Don LaBonte as he brandishes a sweet potato shaped more like a croissant. "We don't want them with that pretty shape like you get in the grocery store."

"We're witnessing a revolution in the making, not unlike potatoes" bred to become French fries, says Jan de Weerd, a potato expert and vice president of global agricultural strategy and services at ConAgra's Lamb Weston potato-processing unit.

ConAgra doesn't expect sweet-potato fries to take over McDonald's Corp. menus anytime soon. But the Omaha, Neb., company is spending $155 million to build a sweet-potato processing plant in Delhi, La., with the help of a federal income tax credit and more than $30 million from the state of Louisiana.

When it opens this fall, ConAgra's first new U.S. plant in years will turn sweet potatoes into French fries, waffle fries and other products. ConAgra thinks it is the first factory dedicated to sweet potatoes in North America. H.J. Heinz Co., McCain Foods Ltd. and other companies also produce sweet-potato fries and other products but use standard potato-processing plants.

ConAgra executives hope that new, improved sweet potatoes will fuel growth and profit in its $2.2 billion potato business as well as with its Healthy Choice and other retail brands, where sweet potatoes increasingly are part of the mix. Chief Executive Gary Rodkin has said including sweet-potato fries on restaurant menus also helps boost total fried-potato sales, driving ConAgra sales in both products.
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ConAgra's Lamb Weston division began offering sweet-potato products to restaurants in 2001. Sales took off, growing about 50% a year in the last five years. The national trend to eating healthier helped; sweet potatoes—packed with vitamin A and high in fiber—are widely perceived as healthier, though when fried it's debatable whether they are healthier than regular potatoes.

Sweet potatoes aren't actually potatoes, but the roots of a plant. They are different from yams, although the names are often used interchangeably in the U.S.

Per-capita production of sweet potatoes, a close approximation of consumption, has gradually risen 30% over the last decade, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The percentage of U.S. restaurants offering at least one sweet-potato dish more than doubled by 2009 from 2005—to about 13%—according to survey research from restaurant tracker Datassential.

So far, however, none of the country's largest restaurant chains has consistently offered sweet potatoes nationwide. That's partly because no major food maker can quickly produce fries and other products from sweet potatoes to meet a chain's demand, says Jeffery DeLapp, president of ConAgra's Lamb Weston unit.

When national chain restaurants "do get excited about [sweet potatoes], we beg them for lead time," he says. At that point, "it falls down the list of priorities so fast, we end up losing the opportunity."

A few years ago, executives began to consider whether to build a factory to handle sweet potatoes exclusively. For years, ConAgra has shipped sweet potatoes from the South and Southeast to its potato-processing factory in Washington state.

The sweet potato's shape remains a disadvantage. The pointy ends get snipped, wasting about 10% to 15% or so of the flesh. Because sweet potatoes vary in size, sweetness and color, extra workers are required to cut, taste and sort samples before sending loads through processing machines. Cutting tools sometimes tear through harder, more fibrous sweet-potato fries, wasting more food, says Rick Gardner, Lamb Weston's senior director of manufacturing.

"We're trying to sell this sweet potato in a way that consumers recognize, and that's in long, thin strips," he says. "That challenge with sweet potatoes is a little greater."

In their efforts to remodel the sweet potato, researchers and ConAgra food scientists first sought to determine what mix of sugars and other traits would yield sweet-potato fries that are crispy on the outside but soft and sweet on the inside.

Restaurants and consumers wanted potatoes that are deep orange throughout, without the pale portions that some yams have. Also, the yams would have to maintain the traits while stored for up to a year, perhaps twice as long as they are now.

From the 20,000 sweet potato lines they evaluate annually, the Louisiana researchers selected and then bred the ones that had as many of the traits as possible.

They also began testing whether planting yams farther apart and leaving them in the ground longer before harvest would produce larger potatoes, Mr. LaBonte says.

He says the researchers have bred at least one line of sweet potatoes that include many characteristics desired by ConAgra. Dubbed 07-146, the variety can grow 15% heavier than those on farms today. It could be ready for processing into fries and other edibles in three to five years, he says. ConAgra says it could take seven to 10 years.

Local sweet potato farmers are eager to see the new ConAgra plant open. "We've had our guts kicked out the last two years," says Ken Thornhill, who, like many Louisiana growers, lost about half the yams on his 750 acres in recent years to harsh weather. Selling more to ConAgra, he says, "may very well be a matter of survival."

Write to Ilan Brat at ilan.brat@wsj.com