W.D. Potato Ltd., which has been in business for over 40 years, supplies more than 400 million pounds of potatoes annually to major chip manufacturers in Canada and the United States.

Mark VanOostrum, field manager for the Beeton, ON-based company, oversees more than 50 growers and 15,000 acres of chip-stock potato production.

The company contracts chipping potatoes in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

“We have a quality lab and do biweekly quality evaluations, including fry tests on all of our supply,” said Mr. VanOostrum. “We conduct sugar analysis as well, as that has an effect on the fry color and length of storage.”

Mr. VanOostrum spends most of his time evaluating quality, dealing with growers and setting up contracts. He is also responsible for looking after the seed supply for the many varieties the company grows. “Probably 70 percent of the supply we grow is proprietary,” he said, and the remainder are public varieties.

The company’s biggest buyer is Frito Lay, but it also supplies the growing private label business as well.

If you’re in the Northeast and eating a bag of chips while reading this, odds are that W.D. supplied the potatoes. Moving 400 million pounds of potatoes annually, the company is among the larger suppliers of chipping potatoes in Canada and one of the top in the Americas. The company also has a logistics division, and it warehouses one-third of its crop at a storage facility on the W.D. Potato property. The growers store the remainder of the crop.

The company owners, Walter and Linda Davidson, recently celebrated 40 years in business. They are both still involved in day-to-day operations seven days a week. Their son, Paul, and their daughter, Kim, are also involved, handling logistics and shipping. With the company for 10 years, Mr. VanOostrum enjoys the diversity of the job — working in the office, going to the fields, dealing with customers and growers — which he credits for keeping the job interesting.

A key focus is “trying to improve quality and reduce costs, because that’s what our buyers demand,” said Mr. VanOostrum. Sustainability is a big part of the job as well because “it really is a big challenge — there’s the environmental aspect and also the economic side of things.”

He cites documentation and transparency as key pillars of the company’s sustainability model. “It’s about telling our buyers what we do and how we do things,” he said.

At a recent national supply meeting, an area identified for growth was the need to work on social responsibility. “When we buy from you, we expect you to do good things,” he said. “We want to make sure all our growers are on the same page” both socially and from a process perspective.

The company is working to keep costs down and continues to strive to develop better quality on fewer acres.

Innovation plays a major role in the industry — precision agriculture, guidance systems, aerial photography, satellite imagery, optical sorting and variable-rate inputs are just some of the technologies Mr. VanOostrum noted. “We’re doing a lot of it already. You have to embrace tech, and a lot of it is data. In farming you don’t always have time to mine through data,” he said.

As for the current market, “the supply is very close to matching up with when the new crop is available — it depends on how long quality holds up. It’s looking very good into July,” he said. This may affect the import of chipping potatoes from the United States, “but you never know what changes Mother Nature may have for us.”