How much do you pay for a coffee? Before Starbucks, as little as you could. After all Coffee was a commodity. The big Coffee guys like Folgers and Maxwell House all worked as hard as they could to offer a less and less quality product at an ever lower price. As a man who had grown up in Europe, I could not find a good cup of coffee in North America,
Now people think nothing of paying $3-6 for a cup. It is hard to get a bad cup of coffee. We are also investigating many new sources, blends and beans. We are beginning to become discriminating about coffee. We are even starting to get interested in who grows it and who they are paid - the rise of Fair Trade.
Well now how do you see the potato?
For most of us, it is like the pre-Starbucks days for coffee. Potatoes are a commodity. We wouldn't know quality even if it was offered to us. We simply load up. Red ones, white ones or bakers. Hey sometimes we pay extra for an Idaho not knowing that all an Idaho is is a common Russet Burbank that are a dime a dozen.
One of the things that the Food Trust is doing is to teach us the difference between quality and not and to help us find the type that will suit the meal that we have planned. For - like coffee or wine - There is a quality gradient and differences in type have huge differences in what lands on our plate.
No hiding in a bag here. The Food Trust standards are so high that we display the spuds loose. We also tell you what the varieties are and what they are best used for. The leaflets at the front of the display will tell you what to look for.
Some of FT's best sellers are very small potatoes. These are called "Creamers". Partly this may be because they simply look nice on a plate. In the commodity world, you tend to get all sorts of sizes all mixed up. FT grade not just by variety but by size.
The demand for small potatoes is growing and this will have a big impact on the land.
In industrial potatoes that are used in the fry plants, quality is partly defined as size. This means that farmers who supply the fry industry have to use late varieties such as the Russet Burbank that have to be harvested in October too late for a cover crop. So the fields are bare over the winter. If there is not enough snow, we have what happened last winter - masses of topsoil blows off the field. The Russet Burbank has to have a large amount of fertilizer to reach the size needed for ideal fry production. Because it is in the field for such a long time it needs a lot of protection. Because it has to be harvested in a two week window with a hard end of frost, it has driven a huge scale up in equipment - if you don't get them out of the ground in time- you lose the year.
Small potatoes are from varieties that mature early and get harvested early so that we can put a cover crop on in time to protect our soil and our rivers. There is lots of time to harvest them and hence less demand to have big equipment and hence big fields with less hedgerows. Early varieties also need much less fertilizer and fewer insecticides and herbicides - all in all if we could shift our crop from Russets to early varieties we would make a huge impact on our environment.
My hope is that we are on the road to creating an informed customer. With you as such a customer, we can start to make the changes that will help us make a living and to be better stewards of our land.