PepsiCo goes off the water grid

The potato is about 80 percent water.

The potato chip? Well, by the time the potato becomes a crispy chip, the water is mostly gone, deliciously replaced by oil.

Still, potato chip factories need a lot of water to make their salty snacks. So why not take the water from the potato itself? That's what PepsiCo hopes to do in four of its Walkers' Crisp factories in the United Kingdom.

Walkers boasts that all of its potatoes come from the British countryside, but what if drought strikes? In that case, they could just begrudgingly outsource their spuds from Europe but there are other uncertainties looming: possible changes in climate, regional water usage spurred by population growth, and governmental water regulations.

Instead of waiting for future restrictions to unfold, the company says it would rather see what it can do with what its got. And what they've got is about 350,000 tons of potatoes each year.

The somewhat vague plan given is to use existing technologies already at work in the world's drier areas and to somehow capture the water vapor that burns off when the potatoes cook.

The Guardian quotes Walter Todd, PepsiCo's vice president of sustainability in Europe:

Water is still an emerging issue. Three to five years ago it was not much talked about but that is changing rapidly. The unpredictability makes us nervous as a business. We are looking at it with a new lens around where we get all our key ingredients such as sunflower oil for our crisps, orange juice for our Tropicana brand and oats for Quaker Oats. There has been a risk assessment at a high level and we are now going through contingency planning.

According to PepsiCo, Walkers' biggest factory cut its water usage by 42 percent between 2001 and 2007. Now, they are aiming higher, hoping to become completely self-reliant, or potato-reliant, for their water supply.

The company is spending more than $350,000 to test the "i-Crop." Linked to a weather forecast system, this monitor would measure moisture in a potato field. If successful, the smart irrigation system would give the tubers precisely the amount of water they require for optimal growth, possibly decreasing fertilizer need in the process.

PepsiCo says it will also experiment with different types of potato that require less water to grow. In five years, their goal is to have found spud substitutes for 90 percent of their Saturna, Hermes and Lady Rosetta potatoes.

Images: PepsiCo and Flickr/Debs Koritsas
Via: TreeHugger