New potato peeling and sorting machines help Indian company increase production
Soon after setting up the business in 2005, ATOP Foods became India's first potato chip and nankeen…Soon after setting up the business in 2005, ATOP Foods became India's first potato chip and nankeen producer to achieve ISO 2000:2005 certification for food safety management systems. Following years of success in western India, in 2018, this business founded a new company, Bizz Corporation. This business focuses on French fries and specialty products sold under the ChillFill brand name, with ambitions to move into export markets.
With this new need to increase production quantities while maintaining high product quality, Bizz Corporation invested in steam peeling and sorting solutions from TOMRA Food. At its four-hectare site in Morbi city, in the state of Gujarat, this plant processes approximately 120 tons of potatoes and produces 60 tons of French fries daily.
Opportunities demanded change
Bizz Corporation’s production lines have been getting busier by the year. One reason is the company’s good reputation. Another is the popularity of the recently-launched ChillFill brand, because demand is increasing across Asia for products such as French fries. Yet another reason is a crop shortage in Europe in recent years. As a result, the plant in Morbi has witnessed a three-fold increase in demand in just a few years – and expects demand to keep rising in the next few years.
Mr. J M Patel, Bizz Corp’s CEO, remembers: “With the launch of ChillFill, we set ourselves the dual targets of increasing production volumes and product variety, as well as achieving consistently high product quality. This meant we had to upgrade our potato peeling and sorting machines. We needed machines with high performance, high efficiency, and high consistency, and we wanted to reduce food waste. We also needed to be confident that our purchased machines would have good technical support.”
While Bizz Corp has strengthened its presence in India, so too has TOMRA Food, the manufacturer of grading, sorting, and peeling technologies. Since first arriving in India nine years ago, they installed more than 150 units in the country, and in 2019 the company opened a new 4,000-square-foot customer service center in Bengaluru. This facility features a testing and demonstration area, where customers can view a simulation of how products would be sorted and defects identified in their own production environment. This enables customers to be sure they are choosing the best solutions available.
Mr. Patel says: “We knew that TOMRA has a great reputation, the in-house engineering capabilities to set up projects, and a long history of designing and manufacturing sorting and peeling machines. We were also reassured by their recent investments to strengthen customer support in India. So naturally, we opened discussions with them about our challenges and objectives for producing more potato chips and French fries. These talks identified two critical solutions: the Orbit Steam Peeler and the TOMRA 5B sorter. Both were installed at our premises in 2022, when we launched the ChillFill brand, and are running 24/7.”
