The Rise of the French Fry Cartel
After decades of consolidation, just four firms now control at least 97 percent of the $68 billion frozen potato market. A new spate of antitrust lawsuits accuses them of brazen price-fixing.
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/doubt
Of all the foods to try to corner the market in, frozen potato strips seems so unlikely and pointless. You can make them at home easily enough with a fry cutter mandolin
It's really trivial to bake your own bread (especially given that so many kitchens have ovens) and yet most people still buy it from bakeries.
French fries, made at home, are also difficult to bake right to a crisp - it requires thoroughly oiling them and, even if you do so, I swear there's something fancy frozen chips use to get some crisping without causing clumping.
Bread baking is hardly trivial. 10 min of kneading alone makes it a poor comparison let alone the 5 hr rise.
Fry making is cut, wash, boil in salted water with a splash of vinegar until soft but still holds, rinse, dry, and freeze. Freezing is the trick btw.
It's trivial with a bread machine, just like restaurant-style French fries are trivial with a mandolin and a deep fryer.
...and the 5hr rise, and the disaster you need to cleanup? Bread making is anything but trivial even with an expensive machine. It's a bad comparison.
What disaster? Have you never used a bread machine? You throw all the ingredients in, press the button, a few hours later you have bread.
ofc I have. Even IF it doesn't splash any flour out the side due to shifting of flour in the early stages, the ring of glue inevitably left on the bowl and the attachments requires cleanup. Have to split/prep the kneaded dough into loaves? How you do that? On a floured surface. With fries you rinse the knife, mandolin and bowl in water and wipe dry. You arguing this is even close is ridiculous.
What about disposing of all that oil you're deep frying with? Just pour it down the drain?
We have oil reclamation sites that accept all oils, vehicular to cooking.
So not all that trivial since you need to put the oil in some sort of disposal container, hope it doesn't spill so you don't have to clean that up, then drive it to an oil reclamation site.
Think I'd rather make bread.
No-knead breads exist and are delicious.
Correct! There are tricks which make a huge difference.
Did you read the article? This is not about consumers, but professionals making french fries all day. It's really trivial to make "homemade" fries, and if the cost is significantly lower, many businesses will do it.
It's not at all comparable to bread baking, because with fries you basically only add a couple extra steps, while with bread you have to make ALL the steps, and it's a way longer process that takes equipment space and time to do.
There's a reason bread cost about 4-5 times as much as french fries, while the ingredients cost about the same.
IDK why you are downvoted, my first thought was that a company tried the same here in Denmark with fried onions.
It's idiocy to try to monopolize a market, with very low threshold for entry. If their cartel manages to increase prices to have higher profits than they should, it's very easy for a competitor to step in.
They may have a sort of cartel, but they are pretty limited in how far they can go with that. What they can do, is avoid bankrupting each other with constant price wars.