Potatoes in oil country: Inside Alberta's ascension to French fry royalty

Michel Camps has been growing potatoes on his family farm for over two decades, but he still isn’t sick of eating his favourite spud specialty — French fries.

“We eat potatoes probably five times a week,” Camps said. “My kids love it.”

Work on Camps’ sprawling farm near Taber, Alta. is a nearly year-round endeavour. He and his team of just seven full-time staff harvest over 36,000 tonnes of potatoes each year — enough for more than 207 million orders of medium-sized McDonald’s fries.

“We organize . . . we call it ‘fry Friday,’ ” Camps said. “Five o’clock on Friday, we’ll shut down and we’ll have a beer and some fries.”

Long known as the oilpatch province, Alberta is also the potato capital of Canada — its wedges end up on dinner plates as far away as Japan. And its ascension to French fry royalty has helped the country become a bigger exporter of frozen potatoes than the United States.

“(Potatoes) are by far the most important crop for us,” Camps said.

Camps moved to Canada from Holland, Netherlands, in 2002, around the time food processing giants like McCain Foods Ltd. and Lamb Weston Holdings Inc. — now major players in the frozen potato business — set up shop on the prairies.

Since then, the industry has seen explosive growth.

Over the past 25 years, farmland dedicated to potatoes in Alberta has grown by nearly 55 per cent, up to 81,760 acres, the latest data from Statistics Canada shows.

It means Alberta has been producing more spuds, too.

This year, Alberta harvested the most potatoes of any province — over 27 per cent of the 12.6 billion pounds grown in Canada. Manitoba farms accounted for 21 per cent of the total, while Prince Edward Island produced more than 17 per cent, according to StatsCan.

“There definitely is more demand in Alberta,” Jeff Ekkel, who runs a family farm near Lacombe, Alta., said.

Ekkel attributed the surging spud sales to increased processing capacity in Alberta, making potatoes a more enticing option for farmers to grow.

In 2019, Cavendish Farms Corp. — named for its home base on P.E.I. — opened a new facility to process up to 735 million pounds of potatoes annually, while McCain is expected to finish doubling the size of its Lethbridge plant sometime in 2026.

Canadian potatoes ‘respected around the world’

Ekkels’ farm produces a dozen varieties of seed potatoes, which he sells to other farmers to grow. Their best seller — the Russet Burbank — is a common French fry variety, he said.

The global market for fresh and frozen French fries was worth over US$17 billion in 2024, and is expected to balloon by nearly six per cent annually until 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights.

Canada is the world’s third-largest exporter of frozen French fries, behind Belgium and the Netherlands, according to Cedric Porter, a potato expert and editor of the World Potato Markets industry newsletter.

Porter said Canada’s exports of frozen potato products — such as French fries, tater tots and wedges — have overtaken the U.S. over the past several years, as the maple-leaf-clad country exports up to 1.3 million tonnes annually.

“Most of that goes to the U.S., but increasingly it’s going to other markets as well,” Porter said. “Canadian potatoes are respected around the world, and they are in demand.”

Alberta’s role in the French fry food chain is vast — spuds grown on the prairies reach most of North America, and even many Asian countries.

Camps, the farmer who dines regularly on potatoes, said countries such as Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and many others are likely serving up spuds grown in Alberta.

“It could be wedges or hash browns or tater-tots, but the bulk of it will be French fries,” Camps said.

Potato production pendulum shifting

P.E.I. long held the crown as Canada’s biggest potato producer, but the pendulum has shifted westward in recent years as spud demand surged.

“We’re at capacity,” Greg Donald, general manager of the P.E.I. Potato Board, said. There are over 87,000 acres dedicated to potato production in the province, a figure that’s hardly changed in the past 15 years.

The rise in demand has meant production and processing facilities have begun to set up shop where there’s room to grow, and there’s less and less land on P.E.I. for potatoes.

“Believe me, we’d have way more than Alberta if we had a bigger island,” Donald said.

If consumer appetites for frozen fries continue to grow, Leigh Anderson, a senior economist at Farm Credit Canada, expects potatoes to keep consuming more farmland.

Still, potatoes play a prominent role in P.E.I.’s agricultural industry, Anderson said, with around 50 per cent of its farms’ revenues coming from spuds. Meanwhile, potatoes make up just two per cent of farmer incomes in Alberta.

“Potatoes are still really important to P.E.I.’s farm economy,” Anderson said. “It’s how diverse Alberta’s Ag sector is, how big it is, and just the land base relative to Prince Edward Island.”

Donald says the focus on the island province has shifted towards “how do we get better?” rather than growing larger, with innovation being crucial to the industry.

With more potato processing capacity expected to come online in Alberta in 2026, the business case for spuds is growing further, according to Camps. Even though his farm covers about 4,000 acres — about half of it dedicated to potatoes — it’s still not quite enough for his family’s spud-loving appetite.

“Believe it or not, some of the varieties that we grow are not that suitable for some of the cooking that we do in the house,” Camps said. “So we still buy some potatoes from a neighbour here that has a market garden to prepare for the household.”

swilhelm@postmedia.com