A potato chip is a delicate thing, Fragile. A pound of pressure will crush it. So when you're moving 250 tons of chips through your plant, as they do every day at Jays Foods, you need to have a system. "You don't buy potato crumbs, you buy potato chips," said Tom Howe, CEO and co-owner of the Chicago company, at 99th and Cottage Grove. Jays makes 125 different types and brands of chips and several hundred varieties of popcorn, puffs, twists, pretzels and assorted bagged munchies
Jays combats the tendency of potato chips to crush into finders with a variety of conveyor belts, radial filling chutes and gently vibrating slides, where masses of chips, a yard deep, are gradually massaged forward, the outer layer of chips shearing away like the face of a glacier. The raw material is far easier to handle. An entire semi-trailer of sturdy North Dakota "chipping" potatoes can be emptied in a matter of minutes, by backing the trailer onto a hydraulic lift, tilting it 45 degrees and letting the potatoes-grown for their thin skins and low moisture-tumble out.
About a dozen semi-trailers' worth of potatoes arrive every day. The potatoes are immediately separated into big and small sizes for a purpose both reasonable and extraordinary: Big potatoes make big chips that go into large bags; small potatoes make small chips for lunch-size bags.
"Nobody wants to open a small bag and find three big potato chips in it," Howe said.
Computers keep track of everything, shunting potatoes to 15,000- pound holding bins. Each bin feeds into a pipe containing a turning screw-a version of the ancient Archimedes screw used to pump water- that moves the potatoes from the bin to conveyor belts, to where they are washed and skinned-the skin scrubbed off by metal bristle brushes.
No machine can detect if a potato is rotten inside. So a pair of human inspectors reach into the passing brown parade and give the potatoes a quick squeeze. Occasionally, they snatch one and slice it open, usually revealing black areas of rot, a skill they attribute to experience.
"I know," said Alicia Jimenez, asked to explain what about a potato tips her off to slice it open and find rot.
The naked potatoes are sent into high-speed chippers-spinning brass rings, each with eight blades inside, straight blades for straight chips, ripple blades for ripple chips.
The blades cut the potatoes, but the potatoes take their revenge. Every three hours the blades are dulled and the line must be stopped so the old rings can be replaced by new rings with sharpened blades.
The sheer quantity of slicing spews big foamy banks of starch from either side of the chipper, which calls to mind a washing machine gone berserk. Potato chips account for about 55 percent of Jays' business. The raw chips spend three minutes cooking in hot corn oil, which is constantly circulated and filtered. Then they are salted, and flavorings - barbecue, for instance, or sour cream and onion-are added.
After the chips are fried, there is another quality check, in which workers pluck burned and deformed chips out of the masses passing by. The chips are conveyed on a link grid, wide enough to let broken chips fall through.
The chips also are laser-inspected, rushing, in a single layer, over a complex device called an Opti-Sort Scanner. Chips with dark spots or holes are detected by a laser, which instructs one of 82 small tubes to fire a puff of air that knocks the substandard chip off the line, into a discard bin.
The discards-about 3 percent of production-are gathered up and used: Starch is drawn out and sold to cornstarch makers; the rest goes to hog feed. Just as the stockyards were said to use every part of the pig but the squeal, at Jays every part of the potato is used but the rich, earthy smell.
Jays even tried to sell burnt chips to the public once, about 20 years ago. "Consumers kept telling us they liked the brown chips," said Len Japp Jr., recalling the "Brownies.' variety." It went over like a lead balloon." Japp and his father, now 93 and honorary chairman of the board, sold the company to Borden in 1986. "They almost ruined it," Howe said, citing a slump in product quality and neglect of the Jays distribution system. "They lost the connection with the consumer."
By 1994, Jays was on the rocks and the Japps, allied with Howe, bought the company back. Not too many people have a second chance in life," said Japp, whose children are in the company.
Getting the chips in the bags is another challenge: You can't just fill up bags and seal them: the chips would be smashed. Rather. a conveyor pours chips-gently-onto the central hub of a large, wheel like device, where the chips scatter into 15 buckets that are, basically, scales. A computer monitors the weight of each bucket and opens up the exact combination that, in this case, will fill a 14-ounce bag. The bags are packed into boxes that read: "HANDLE LIKE EGGS."
While not exactly perishable, potato chips do have a shelf life of about eight weeks, only one day of which is spent at the plant. "Potatoes that are in this morning will be in our branches tomorrow morning, ready to hit the streets." Howe said. Jays is still a regional brand, sold in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Missouri. But business has grown 50 percent in the past two years.
"We connect to people's lifestyle." Howe said. "People treat themselves with Jays. We're in the fun food business."
Do you feel that Jays is overdoing it with its concern for quality? Explain.