Like many monster stories, this one starts quietly and then gets bigger and bigger. The story starts with a simple potato. A Michigan potato. Michigan producers grew nearly 100 million dollars worth of potatoes. We’re not the BIGGEST potato producer in the United States—we’re tenth. Yet Michigan grows a special kind of potatoes—Snowden, Pike, Atlantic and Frito-Lay varieties most commonly used for chips. Three quarters of Michigan’s potato crop is used for potato chips. And potato chips are America’s most popular snack food.

So here comes one more monster fact: Michigan is the largest producer in the United States of potatoes used for potato chips. Envision millions and millions of potatoes growing in Michigan fields. It takes monster equipment and monster production techniques to make the millions and zillions of chips for Super Bowl celebration and for all year round. Potato chips are an American invention, and Michigan has a special role in helping that invention take top honors as America’s most beloved snack.

This monster of the snack food industry has to go through many steps before it takes on its form as a potato chip. First the potatoes are dumped into a bath and washed. Then they are lifted to the peeler. The peeler is not the modest little metal potato peeler you use in your kitchen. The peeler is a long cylinder with rollers that revolve around and around stripping the potato of its skin. The peeled potatoes then empty unto an inspection table where inspectors look for defects in the potatoes to remove.

Then the potatoes move to a slicer that looks like something out of a scary monster movie. The slicer features eight sharp blades held upright in a ring. In the center of this ring is a revolving plate. One by one the potatoes drop upon this revolving plates. Over and over the spinning plates throw the potatoes against the revolving blades to remove slices from the potatoes. Generally these slices are 1/20 of an inch. 

These newly made slices are carried to the fryer while being washed and dried. Hot oil and slices are put in the back of the fryer together. (The fryer is a long shallow trough.) While cooking the chips, the hot oil pushes them from the back of the trough to the front where they are carried off by conveyor belt. 

A conveyor lifts the chip out of the oil. Then workers salt, season and inspect them. A conveyor belt carries them to machines where they are packaged. Those packages arrive at your grocery or convenience stores. Americans snack on potato chips all year round. Yet more of these monstrously popular snack are consumed on Super Bowl Sunday than any other day. 

And to think that this monster snack began with just a humble Michigan potato!

Source
Michigan Department of Agriculture, Great Lakes Grown: Agricultural Production Facts. Lansing, Michigan Department of Agriculture, 2001.