With an investment of 250 million dollars, the American company Lamb Weston progress in building a giant potato products plant. The company is the largest in the US preparation of pre-fried potatoes and other value-added specialties. Works more than one hundred countries and has 17 industrial plants in the United States, the European Union and Australia.
The new factory is under construction in the Industrial Park of Mar del Plata, on a Property of 19 hectares. Work started a year ago and is proceeding according to plan.
In a ceremony held this Thursday at the plant under construction, the company’s top executives explained the fundamentals of the business.
Present were the Secretary of Industry and Development, Ignacio de Mendiguren, the local mayor, Guillermo Montenegro, and the owners of the banks of the Nation, Silvina Batakis, and of the Province, Juan Cuattromo. All production will be destined for the international market.and the focus is on direct shipping from the nearby port of Mar del Plata.
“Strategic location and extraordinary potential”
Gerardo Scheufler, general manager of Mexican supply chain for Lamb Weston, said he had discovered the “extraordinary competitive potential of potato production in Argentina. He thinks that the position is strategic, in a world that pays close attention to production processes and measures the carbon footprint in all the links in the chain, where transport plays a more relevant role.
In the production area adjacent to Mar del Plata, 50% of the Argentine potato is produced, with high technological level and expertise on the part of the producers. “With this plant up and running, we will produce to serve 3 million servings of french fries a day worldwide”.
De Mendiguren said that this work goes in the direction desired by his Secretariat: export with added value. “The average price of a ton that Argentina exports today is $400 a ton, while we import products worth $1,500 a ton. Exporting industrialized potatoes is the right way forward,” he stressed. He added that the Lamb Weston plant will require a lot of gas, hence the frozen chips it will ship refrigerated containers they will be too a way to export gas with added value.
Federico Peralta Ramos, general manager of Lamb Weston’s Argentina operation, highlighted the impact of the investment on the employment generation, both in construction and in operation. And the “diffusion effect”, generating infrastructure that will be shared by other businesses region of.
He concluded with a very suggestive sentence: “Only those who bank in the desert get an oasis”. The businessman Ignacio Noel, the main shareholder of the Sociedad Comercial del Plata, applauded loudly. SCP had purchased Farm Frites, another manufacturer of potato chips. Noel interested Lamb Weston in investing in the business. It was successful: today it is the Argentine partner of the North American.
Montenegro, who traded mutual applause with De Mendiguren, he said that among the works necessary to promote this type of activity, there is the need to ring road who drives efficiently and directly to the port. Today all traffic has to pass through the city, when it could go almost directly from the Industrial Zone to the port.
The president of the Port Consortium commented it, Gabriele Felicizia clarion that the port requires important investments in cranes and bridge cranes, to streamline container loading. “The goal is to be able to load in Mar del Plata what today has to do more than 400 kilometers to reach Buenos Aires.
Among those present was one of the largest potato producers in Argentina, the former road touring champion Walter Hernández. Walter has been a key player in the potato processing industry for the past three decades.
After the inauguration, North American executives visited the Hernández factories in Nicanor Otamendi, 30 km from Mar del Plata, El “Potato Park” that doesn’t stop growing, where more than 50 thousand tons are conditioned annually of production for various industrial destinations.
“I have traveled all over the potato world -Scheufler confessed-, but nowhere have I found a producer of the level of knowledge and quality of structures like Walter”, who entertained the group with a safety pin roast… with potatoes. Delicious potatoes of a French variety.
Why the origin of the potato is America, but there is nothing that has become so globalized.
Source: Clarin
