How to make potato chips (37 photos)

The theme of today's reportage - PepsiCo's plant for the production of potato chips Lay's, recently opened in the city of Azov, Rostov region. In addition, the plant produces crackers Hrusteam. Walk in series along the entire production line and consider it in detail.

It is believed that the chips were more than 150 years ago in the United States. Legend has it that one of the elite American restaurants, the client (railroad magnate Vanderbilt) did not like the restaurant's signature dish, "French fries" and he returned it to the kitchen, with the claim that the potato is too thick. The chef decided to play a trick on the client and the sliced ​​potatoes on thin slices and fry in oil applied to the table. Surprisingly, the customer really liked the dish, and since then the restaurant menu, a new dish - potato chips.

Lay's potato chips produced in 1938. Today the company Frito Lay is one of the leading manufacturers of salty snacks in the world as well as in Russia. Lay's potato chips deliveries to Russia began in the mid-90s, and in 2002 opened its first factory Frito Lay in a Moscow Kashira.




Unloading, cleaning and temporary storage of potatoes

Every day here is unloaded nine 20-ton truck with potatoes. Potatoes on a belt conveyor falls into the washing machine, which is used to clean the water recirculation. Everything in the world, there are three such automatic car wash. The washing process is physically impossible to remove all takes place in a closed container. After washing the potatoes are in temporary storage in bins - special containers where supplied as needed for production.



Cleaning, sorting and cutting potatoes

Before potato tubers fall into a special machine for cutting, the inspector visually inspect going through the Ribbon, tubers, and if necessary remove any visible defects.



By the way: For the production of chips, not every good potatoes. There are so-called chipsovye potato varieties that contain high amounts of starch.



All employees periodically undergo a medical examination and have medical records, this is done to ensure that the ill person did not get to production. In addition, in front of the shop, all must wash their hands.



Peeling potatoes occurs in abrasive drums batch. First is loaded in the required amount of potatoes weighing hopper, then unloading occurs in the drum.



Directly cutting takes place mechanically by the rotation of the cone-shaped heads of the drum. Inside the cutting machines, eight pairs of sharp blades that cut tuber into thin slices. The thickness of each slice of less than two millimeters.



Roasting

After cutting the potato slices enter the most "heart" of the production line of chips - frying bath for frying slices and chips producing base. This equipment, which has no analogues, was created specifically for plant PepsiCo and show it can not be.



Thinly sliced ​​potatoes come in a bath of oil, which are fried for three minutes at 180 degrees Celsius. Quality oil, as well as high-quality potatoes - the basis of flavor crisps.



The plant was improved formulation using a special mixture of vegetable oils, including sunflower oil vysokoolinovogo domestic production, whereby a 25% reduced saturated fat content in the final product.



Every day, the plant being tested quality. Check how the basic chips, just coming out of the oven, and completely wrapped packages.



Adding spice

At this stage, the potato chips fried in adds special aromatic and flavoring additives, which are based on the salt.



Simultaneously, the production line can go three flavors.



Packing

By the way: The plant is designed to produce 50,000 tonnes of finished products per year. Some fantastic figure, in my opinion.



On three conveyors ready chips are fed to the packaging. First, there is a distribution and weighting.



By the way: Please note that the entire length of the line are very few employees. It uses modern equipment that operates in a completely avtomitizirovannom mode. In addition, it is important that as little as possible people in contact with a finished product.



Weight machines weigh multiple servings and calculate the best combination of weight, which has the exact weight in order to meet the standards and specified on the package weight.



If we consider that the net weight of a pack of 28 grams, you can imagine the precision adjustment of the equipment.



Weighted portion is discharged to the packaging line.



Portion control passes to the presence of impurities (metal detector) and into the package, which by this time developed a packaging machine of packaging materials (foil). Before they are sealed seam in the package supplied food nitrogen, which enables the desired shelf life of the product. Weighing and packaging equipment operates synchronously at speeds up to 80 bags per minute.



Packed package comes with chips operators who manually folded bags in a carton.



Boxes with chips stacked on pallets and transported to the warehouse.





Is parallel line for production of crackers

A mixture of flour and water is fed into the extruder, heated and mixed thoroughly. The extruder crackers come in the form of bundles, which are cut to size by rotating knives.



The next step crackers are dried in the oven and get to the site of application of spices.



Packaging line is identical to the one on which produce chips.





Weighing takes place in a similar weighting machine which generates several portions and selects the best combination for the sealing of a package.



Ready crackers.



Performance of one line - 12 tons of finished products per day.



Employees are not allowed to wear watches and jewelery, manicure and denied false nails, hair must be covered with netting, so that nothing gets onto the conveyor.



In addition to taste and visual matching slices accepted standards, here check the quality of packaging. The seam should be flat and open packages should one movement smoothly along the seam, without breaks.





The staff of the plant. By the way, the production line is working around the clock in three shifts.





The appearance of the plant.



Bon appetit!