Tater Made

Shipping potatoes in potatoes. Celebrating 70 years in business, the Wada Family has been growing potatoes and other produce ever since 1943. Frank Wada emigrated to the U.S. from Japan in 1922. He settled in Southeastern Idaho and started growing potatoes on 160 rented acres. And like the old Virginia Slims ads used to say, “You’ve come a long way baby.” Wada Farms is about to start shipping produce in a unique plastic sack made with up to 25 percent potato starch. Chris Wada, the produce company’s director of marketing: “It is a potato bag up to 25% of which is made with potatoes. We use renewable, fully from recycled potato starch. All of the starch has been reclaimed through different potato processing facilities to where it is literally a waste product that we pull starch out of and then process it to dry starch which is then converted into pellets that we use for the bags. Are the bags biodegradable? Regular plastic bags decompose in a very very long time. Our bags take about two years in the ground. In my mind, it tells a great story of fresh potatoes, packed in a bag made out of potatoes.”