The article “Quest for the perfect potato pays off for McCain Foods in India” briefly describes the success of MacCain foods in India.
India’s love affair with the french fry is so intense that the Canadian potato giant is injecting another $69 million on top of its current $37 million investment into greatly increasing output at its plant in Mehsana that MacCain Foods currently captures nearly 80% of India’s frozen potato market. Even the production of 43,000 tons of potatoes each month is not enough to keep up with the demand of the Indian population.
A pair of agronomists from India and Canada have played majors roles in helping McCain achieve its Indian miracle. Devendra Kumar, the general manager for agriculture at Mehsana, and Ghislain Pelletier, who is based in Canada, spent eight years driving more than half a million kilometres around India in a relentless quest for the perfect potato and the ideal place to grow it.
“We were looking for big potatoes. What we mostly found were tiny baby potatoes. They were low yield, had too much sugar, leached too much fertilizer into the soil and were produced using outdated agricultural practices such as flood irrigation that wasted water and encouraged pests that cause blight.” says Kumar.
The solution Kumar and Pelletier arrived at was a combination of drip irrigation and sprinkler irrigation. The potatoes came from tissue grown in Canada, the United States and Europe. It is used to create seeds grown at high altitude in the Himalayas near Tibet. The cultivation of the potatoes was mostly centred in Gujarat because its sandy loam is good for potatoes and its reliable, frost-free, dry climate, combined with drip irrigation, discourages blight.
To date, McCain Foods still remains as a key corporation in serving potatoes to the Indian people.
the article can be found here