A NEW LOOK AT OIL RECOVERY

The value of oil removal and recovery immediately following the fryer in a potato facility has been the subject of much debate over the years. Indeed, arguments originally obsessed with cost savings vs. selling of the oil have been clouded in recent seasons to the idea that the controlled removal of the oil can provide a higher quality, perhaps even a healthier french fry. This idea has caused many potato processing executives to analyze their existing oil recovery systems and to look into a more efficient or effective system that can actually contribute to the bottom line for the company. REYCO Systems, Inc., of Meridian, Idaho, has been manufacturing its patented Oil Miser® oil recovery system for nearly 20 years. Over that time, they have placed over 120 units worldwide and have heard almost every argument for and against oil removal. What follows are some of the more common beliefs and misconceptions.

“If I remove the oil, I’ll need to replace it with more potato to get my weight up!” This idea has pervaded the french fry industry for decades. The thought is that some of the recovered oil must have been physically removed from the processed french fry, thereby reducing the weight of each individual fry and the overall weight of the final package. This argument leads to the conclusion that more fries are necessary to make required bag weight thereby increasing the product costs per bag. In actuality REYCO has found that none of the common oil removal systems including the Oil Miser® has the ability to remove internal oil from the potato cells after frying.

During the frying process, about 6% of the exiting fry weight is made up of oil and that percentage does not change significantly whether the fry is drained, blotted dry, vibrated, or run across an Oil Miser®. We do know, however, that a significant amount of oil can be recovered in each of these processes. Where does this oil come from? Since it is not being removed from the cells of the fry, it can only be excess surface oil on the fries themselves or available oil on the conveyor belt; oil that will inevitably be lost somewhere between the fryer and the package.

Anyone who has been in a pre-cooler or freezer clean-up crew can tell you where most of this lost oil can be found. Until recently, shoveling up congealed fat and disposing of it was simply a cost of doing business. This loss was often begrudgingly accepted since the price of oil was so much less than the cost of raw potatoes and, in the past, production managers were not overly concerned with the contents of the waste bin. We are all aware that both those issues have become greatly scrutinized over the past few years and many practices of the past are now coming into question. In addition to reducing the freezer fat buildup, an aggressive oil removal system can increase the time between freezer defrosts by as much as fifty percent.

Further down the line, oil loss presents itself as greasy buildup on packaging machines and conveyors. In addition to causing nuisance shut-downs of packaging lines, the culmination of the excess oil is often the appearance of small white globules of a fat/starch mixture that appear in the freeze tunnel and are carried through into the final package. Not the sort of item most producers would utilize to make package weight and definitely not the sort of addition that consumers want to find in their bag of frozen crinkle-cuts!

So what can processors do and how can they justify the cost of doing anything? There is no question that many oil removal solutions are available, from simple drip drains, to vibratory conveyors, to a complete Oil Miser® system; the key though is how can any system be justified and paid for. When a ton of oil cost less than a half ton of raw product, this was a difficult issue and kept oil recovery systems low on the priority list. These days, however, the cost of oil seems to increase monthly and the advent of “healthier” low-in-saturated-fat oils will likely continue to drive your production costs higher in the coming years.

Fortunately, every oil recovery system on the market today has a very reasonable payback period. The question is really how aggressive do you want your recovery system to be? The more aggressive a system, the more costly to install initially, but those costs are quickly offset by more oil recovered and more dollars saved in oil expenses. Over the past few years we have found that the average payback time for a new REYCO Oil Miser®, the most aggressive oil recovery system on the market, is often less than eight months including installation costs if placed on a line where no recovery system currently exists.

Indeed, many processors are in the process of converting to the advanced “DynaMiser” oil removal system. This “DynaMiser,” along with optimization of the existing oil recovery equipment, provides additional savings in oil and money, leading to a payback of less than eighteen months. In addition to cost savings, intangibles such as reduced clean-up time and labor, increased time between freezer defrosts, and cleaner packaging lines need to be weighed, along with your customer’s perception of the quality of a cleaner product coming out of your company’s package. Finally, when you look at how much money a reduction in your oil costs will save you, the speed of the payback, and realize that in the end you’ll be winning over more consumers, the choice to recover your fry oil becomes crystal clear.