The Rise of the French Fry Cartel | Hacker News Reader

The Rise of the French Fry Cartel

jacobin.com

134 pointsohjeez154 comments

While this seems true and I hope these companies get a large fine and some regulatory action takes place to wipe out these third party apps, I'm kind of surprised at the corporate learned helplessness here.

Back in the day McDonald's or one of their fast food competitors would have built their own frozen potato pipeline, made a massive marketing gimmick about cheapest fries and shattered this cartel quickly. It sounds like the companies are taking a high margin and the farmers would love to sell to anyone else. But it feels like the current managers at these fast food companies have gotten so used to outsourcing every part of production they lack the knowledge/remit to even try to set up a competing supply line.

It feels like only it's only efficient to focus core competencies if the people in charge of those stay smaller. Given how big companies can squeeze suppliers I see how they would end up consolidated. But if everyone is doing one thing and consolidating horizontally to negotiate better it becomes kind of red queen race.

Maybe when you have a multi-billion dollar supply chain and complex contract structure you can't just learn to do something new to solve a problem anymore.

The small players can't do much. As mentioned in the article, either potatoes and DIYing are cheaper or they aren't, but medium to large firms presumably could/should do something.

McDonald's has switched between Simplot and McCains a half dozen times in the last ten years. In Australia, they even use both. They have their own pipelines that they require the company matches, already, and companies compete to have them as a customer. The fast food company holds the power in that particular relationship.

McDonald's rejected Simplot's "Innate" in 2020, a GMO potato that they spent about a decade developing. Which basically turned the entire project into a loss. It's one of the main reasons that the Lanthrop plant is closing.

I believe McDonald's does have their own pipelines for various ingredients, including beef, in countries where it's necessary for uniformity, outside the US. I'd have to assume they've looked at the numbers and determined that having their own potato to french fry pipeline would not shave enough cost off a happy meal to lure enough customers from their competitors to make it worthwhile. Shattering the cartel might not be in their interest.

McDonalds doing those things in other countries doesn't necessarily show that the parts of their organization responsible for their US operations are competent enough to do the same. Assuming that whatever the corporation is doing presently must be the result of careful rational economic analysis seems like a fallacy of some sort. Just world fallacy? Optimally Run Corporation fallacy.

Upvoted, and I wish I could upvote you twice. Because I did commit a logical fallacy. I can't assume that a decision was made wisely, or informedly, just because it was made by a giant organization with information we're not privy to. People in such organizations are just as incompetent as everyone else.

Just because you (think you) committed a logical fallacy doesn't mean you're wrong.

You can do, or think, the right things for the wrong reasons, even illogical ones.

It’s unlikely they are able to gouge McDonald’s and the large companies. Even the article mentioned that the big competition is for those massive contracts. It’s much more likely that McDonald’s and co can shop around, negotiate a great price, and maintain margins.

It’s the mom and pops, the regional suppliers that can’t do anything, and likely pay much higher prices than the megacorps.

Indeed, it is surprising that you would be able to pull this stunt on such a huge buyer as McDonalds.

Here's an alternative theory that will disappoint the readers of Jacobian - potatoes are a commodity and commodity prices drive inflation. A bad crop, expensive fertiliser, a ground war in one of the largest potato-exporting countries in the world (Ukraine) - all these things would cause suppliers to increase prices in lockstep.

Inflation can be good cover for price collusion, sure, but the reason why it's such good cover is that its effects are almost indistinguishable without a smoking gun. Lets see what the FTC investigation brings up.

(Another note - inflation inflates profits as well as prices.)

> one of the largest potato-exporting countries in the world (Ukraine)

Are you sure about that?

"Other potatoes, fresh or chilled " 2019 [0]:

- 1st: France, 2,119,100,000 kg

- 57th: Ukraine, 5,612,450 kg

"Seed potatoes" 2019 [1]:

- 1st: Netherlands 953,793,000 kg (No 1)

- 48th: Ukraine, 72,377 kg

[0] https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/ALL/yea...

[1] https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/ALL/yea...

Just to augment what you are saying... all potatoes aren't created equally either... size, starches, variety, organic... there are places around North America where certain kinds of potatoes are grown that are completely unsuitable for french fries but might be fine for retail. Even among Russets, for example - you see smaller ones bagged up for retail, but larger ones are often sold loose as "bakers." And sometimes those same big beautiful Russets are undesirable for fries because they are inconsistent sizes, which can be problematic for processing.

> It sounds like the companies are taking a high margin

Are we really sure that's the case?

I bet that mcDonalds has much better people focused on this problem than the Jacobin, and considering how much fries they sell, they have people on it for sure.

Maybe they know more about this market than we do, and have actually found that the prices are not as unreasonable as they seem?

That's a good point, I assumed the farmers in the article were correct on getting squeezed, but individual producers rarely have a good view on the market. And McDonald's et al has been getting flack lately for the price of fries increasing. But looking at the potato price charts it's a pretty frothy market with a huge spike in 2023[0]. Maybe they've decided the suppliers are playing fair enough, at least with them. Or perhaps they are waiting to see if the frozen prices track the commodity price down before they decide to try to do something, I didn't realize the drop the article talks about was so recent.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU01130603 Russet's so not a perfect analogy.

> Back in the day McDonald's or one of their fast food competitors would have built their own...

Where does Costco, which famously went vertical to make its own hot dogs, source its fries? (Admittedly, that was for their food court. And I don't recall that they've got fries on their food court menu.)

Costco doesn’t have fries in their food court (in the US at least).

They sell frozen ore-ida fries, but no potatoes at all in their food court.

It's been a bad time for Lamb Weston. The stock is down over 41% since a year ago. I know this because it's been part of the most unsuccessful algorithmic trading strategy I've ever run. That company has a CEO who's been using the private jet to party all over the place; had to throw out [edit: $120M] of raw potatoes they overbought; and sent $80M of flawed french fries to a major customer (probably McDonald's) which they had to eat back in the last year. I think something fairly major is going to happen soon to change that company's leadership.

Cartels may work for luxury items like diamonds and cocaine, but they're inefficient. A lot more people notice flaws in their fries than in their diamonds and blow.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241216832356/en/JAN...

> throw out $120M of raw potatoes they overbought

This is putting all those efforts to reduce domestic food waste into perspective.

> $80M of flawed french fries .. which they had to eat

I think it would take me a long time to eat $80m of french fries.

> Cartels may work for luxury items like diamonds and cocaine, but they're inefficient

And now a serious point: people have been complaining about food price inflation, and blaming the usual suspects of fiat money and Democrats, but .. what if it was actually the people making the food putting up the prices? Doesn't it often turn out that the secret ingredient is in fact some kind of crime?

> And now a serious point: people have been complaining about food price inflation, and blaming the usual suspects of fiat money and Democrats, but .. what if it was actually the people making the food putting up the prices? Doesn't it often turn out that the secret ingredient is in fact some kind of crime?

What if it was increasing labor prices due to decreases in labor force participation rate and more preferable options for people to earn money?

https://www.voronoiapp.com/wealth/The-Growth-in-Real-Wages-b...

That would be a Good Thing, but people attribute wage growth to their own personal efforts and price growth to evil external forces. So if you have the tiniest bit of a wage/price spiral where labour shortages raise wages and therefore prices (especially in labour-dependent industries like prepared food!), everyone goes bananas.

> I think it would take me a long time to eat $80m of french fries.

About 7000 person-years, I recon.

(Assuming €2.90 for a 231 kcal portion, which is roughly what McD seems to charge, but the search results give me a lot of different numbers and their own website didn't give me any specific price (do I need to place an order or sign in to get that?)).

I could do it in my lifetime I think

You couldn't eat that much in a normal human lifetime, not even if you had cystic fibrosis and therefore both needed and were capable of consuming 10,000 kcal/day every day just to survive.

Maybe the CEO has been overpaying for his executive washroom nose powder.

There's a parallel here with a lot of other industries... back 10+ years ago, companies like Lamb Weston had a lot of actual farmers in the management ranks, IE: people who grew up working in the fields. The shift started sometime after 2000 to MBA types who (thought they) knew numbers, but had never been close to the product. My uncle was one of those farmer types who had helped these companies find serious success (he was part of the development of the curly fry, sweet potato fry, etc) and saw the writing on the wall when he retired and saw the type of new era corporate managers that were coming in.

Cartels don’t mean low quality though, that’s a completely separate and largely orthogonal issue. You don’t even remotely need a cartel for leadership to focus on value extraction and tank the products.

This is a key point: historically, Burger King, McDonalds, Wendy's, etc often sourced their fries out of the same factory, but to different standards. Think starches, batters, fry dimensions, even type of potato in some cases. These companies competed not only on price but also in product consistency.

Actually it does mean lower quality --> Lack of competition means that the product quality typically suffers as a result of rent seeking behavior.

Cartels are a simple type of monopoly.

It’s a lot easier to be shitty when customers don’t have other options.

How much did you lose in which timeframe, if you don't mind me asking?

Cocaine is a very strange business, because the competing suppliers can't appeal to the police or the courts.

I really don't like how they repeatedly try to merge the numbers of Lamb Weston with McCain here. Especially as McCain is a private family-run business, and Lamb Weston is a publicly traded company. They are not remotely the same entity.

"Lamb Weston and McCain alone control 70 percent of the market" hides that McCain holds about 30% of the US market.

McCain treat Simplot as their main rival in most jurisdictions, and have been involved in multiple legal fights with them - one of which is a patent issue that started in 2002 (no. 6,821,540), and is still ongoing. (Currently favouring Simplot).

There's a lot here that feels like... Bad statistics. Not to say that there's no truth in the accusations - but they don't seem to be acting in good faith, and that will wreck them when it comes to the court.

>"Lamb Weston and McCain alone control 70 percent of the market" hides that McCain holds about 30% of the US market.

What exactly is objectionable about this sentence? The two companies are clearly outlined as separate in the article, and the fact that one company holds about half as much market share as both combined is... not surprising or misleading. Would you rather have the 40-30-20-7 split more explicitly outlined, and why do you think that has a big impact on the reader's takeaway from the article?

For that particular line, only those two companies are combined, the others are seperated.

I would not say that elsewhere, the two companies are clearly outlined as separate. Weston is referred to on their own, but McCain tends to be prefixed with "Lamb Weston and".

The Jacobin is an un-serious publication

https://x.com/AlecStapp/status/1876319458362556647

It's Jacobin, they have zero issue with writers torturing statistics to make their point.

I had subscribed to Jacobin a while back in the hopes of balancing out my Economist subscription's viewpoints but wow the quality was not there.

The Economist has value because any prediction they make is 180 degree off what will happen, they're like a delusional oracle, but they still have the gift of prophecy. Jacobin though is just a case of "by embittered leftists, for embittered leftists" and there's no point engaging with it.

Well, look at the source. It’s not surprising.

> There's a lot here that feels like... Bad statistics. Not to say that there's no truth in the accusations - but they don't seem to be acting in good faith, and that will wreck them when it comes to the court.

Well…

There are a couple of cases here:

* 1:24-cv-11801, Northern District of Illinois (class action with Radner's Markets as lead plaintiff)

* 1:24-cv-11816, Northern District of Illinois (class action with Alexander Govea as lead plaintiff - a person who bought frozen potato products at supermarkets)

The complaints were filed only two days apart, by different lawyers; I wonder whether a lot of firms were looking into frozen potatoes and these two ended up first to file?

I hope one or both of these lawsuits goes far enough that we can get to discover and will get to see some emails. That's always the fun part.

Jacobin's entire raison d'etre is looking at the world from a certain very left-wing point of view, and every article of theirs I've ever read slants things as badly as their right-wing counterparts.

You say this, but no Marxist country has ever had a french fry problem. In properly Marxist countries, everyone has always waited patiently in the bread line for their weekly ration.

In this country we call them "food banks".

I think when McDonald’s first opened in Soviet Union and Yugoslavia the problem was workers didn’t want to work that hard for that little money. Sort of like semiconductors in USA today.

Except the party members of course, they got theirs delivered, usually.

> no Marxist country has ever had a french fry problem

No food, no food problems (head tapping meme guy pic)

I think the most interesting part of this article is that this "collusion" is enabled via 3rd party data provider. This is a massive issue, that enables this sort of "uncoordinated" price fixing exercises, via 3rd parties, similar to what happening on the rental market in the U.S.

I'm very surprised that there is not more work in Econ literature studying this. This is essentially breaking the efficient market hypothesis at scale, and is generalizable to every industry.

Price fixing by algorithm is still price fixing.

Especially here that it's painfully obvious, there's not enough actors to justify this third party anyways.

Yes, the point I'm trying to make is that via 3rd party aggregator you can have massive price-fixing collusion without coordination, even with many actors (as long as those actors have converging interests)

That can be possible in theory yeah but in order for these aggregators to work well, the participants usually also send their own data and this makes it clear price fixing.

If you send your own prices and then you get other prices back in return, it's 100% price fixing without any doubt.

That what's making it different from a market study.

Tons of companies use shared 3rd party data providers like Pave to set comp bands for employees too. Your compensation is very likely determined algorithmically as well. I know mine is. I wonder how long it will last.

What's the reason given for using PotatoTrac anyway?

Telling your competition how your own business works sounds like a bad idea.

I have zero difficulty believing this based on my experiences with frozen hash browns for home in the past few years. What I used to get for ~$2.50-3 a bag (occasionally on sale down to $1.67) is now routinely $4 or higher.

When I looked a couple years ago it seemed like there was some news about a year or two of crop issues, but plain potato prices haven't seen the same level of sustained rise in my experience (occasional purchaser, and haven't quite made the jump to just shredding my own).

Contrary to another comment, I'm not convinced that eggs are quite as bad - prices have gone up a lot, but they're much more cyclical and still regularly down where they've traditionally been. I'd absolutely believe that most of the price variation there has been due to flock destruction due to avian flu.

> Lamb Weston and McCain alone control 70 percent of the market; J. R. Simplot controls another 20 percent, and Cavendish Farms accounts for 7 percent, according to court documents

Ok, Cavendish is the 4th player, but the article couldn’t even mention their owners: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_family_(New_Brunswick...

Even the Wikipedia article doesn’t do them justice, but they basically own a province in Canada.

Like the article says, this is happening throughout the food industry. Eggs are a notable example, if you haven't noticed. In December 2023, a jury ordered the largest egg companies to pay $17.7 million in damages, which could triple to approximately $53 million. They've used various methods to limit egg production and it seems the issue is still ongoing...

You can use FRED to chart egg prices going back 25 years, and the major price spikes seem to line up with highly-pathogenic avian flu (HPAI) outbreaks.

Why use correlation to develop a neutral cause hypothesis when there are lawsuit settlements which theorize vast conspiracies of billionaires? That doesn't activate dopaminergic systems at all.

Mea culpa--I used the wrong word, settlement, instead of the correct one, verdict. OTOH, this has to do with inter-corporate battles starting 25 years ago, not some recent rise of commodity cartelling.

A 12-year-old federal antitrust case against the nation's largest egg producers came to a tentative close on Friday, after a jury delivered a verdict awarding four food corporations $17.7 million in damages.

The four plaintiff corporations first sued the egg producers in December 2011, accusing them of using multiple tactics to jack up egg prices starting as early as 1998. However, the jury found the corporations only suffered damages from the price fixing between October 2004 and December 2008. No individual consumers were represented in the suit.

https://www.courthousenews.com/jury-awards-corporations-17-7...

(edit, added link to quote source)

Because a settlement is a lot closer to indicating causation than correlation is.

This comment would make a lot of lawyers’ heads spin.

That's because the legal profession has all kinds of rules about "truth" and what can be admitted in court as "evidence", that differ from true causality. There are whole swaths of things that can be true but inadmissable because they were not discovered the right way.

There is a reason we call practitioners of the law lawyers and not scientists

Decisions to settle are based on money/time/stress cost and probability of favorable judgement from an underqualified judge/jury, rather than the decision just being based on reality, which is often not provable.

If you as a corporation are unwilling to take the time/effort/resources to prove in a court of law that there is (civil case) not enough evidence to show you most likely did the "wrong" thing, then do not be surprised when the public draws adverse inferences.

The expensive nature of the american court system could be improved in a way that you would never be worse off defending yourself, but these companies don't push for that because they LIKE having the power to bully people with stupid expensive lawfare.

Ah yes, because there is a legal document disclaiming any liability, no one would be reasonable when inferring any.

Also, lol at the underqualified jury comment. It's a bit telling on your part. Juries are inherently underqualified? No, sounds like a corporation that doesn't want to face the extreme financial risk that occurs when they face judgment for their conduct.

See this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42601569

Specifically this subthread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612782

Of course, all those comments could be fake, as could mine, but if you have any experience with the courts in the US, then you know going to trial means a lot of uncertainty.

>Of course, all those comments could be fake, as could mine, but if you have any experience with the courts in the US, then you know going to trial means a lot of uncertainty.

I'm an attorney, I stand by exactly what I said. You pointing out there is uncertainty doesn't change my point at all. The majority of the uncertainty is the extent of the risk faced by the corp for its bad deeds. Don't be too obtuse.

In the context of this discussion, i suspect a good lawyer could say: look at the correlation between avian influenza and the price increases...

Unless there were evidence that would come out in discovery that in fact there was price gouging going on.

I would hope even a bad lawyer (or a non lawyer such as a random HN commenter) could make the case that, absent evidence of illegal behavior, one should assume prices change due to shifting supply and demand curves.

My evidence is the settlement. A settlement is not evidence of absence. On the contrary, a settlement suggests just the opposite.

These companies were accused and of conspiring to limit egg supply, artificially inflate prices by reduce chicken numbers through strategies like reducing cage space. They forced their farmers to engage in strategies like culling productive hens early and encouraging "early molting" to reduce egg-laying.

Sure, and plenty of lawyers love putting their head in the sand and relying on the principle that in the US legal system, everyone is entitled to a good legal defense.

How is that relevant here? Most settlements happen in civil cases, where there is no right to a lawyer, much less a good one. Otherwise, I don’t know what you could mean.

It's what all the corporate attorneys tell themselves when they parrot the same line you do about settlements. And in civil cases, corporations must have an attorney, which I suspect you know.

I'm not completely sure the author is making the case they intend... growing up, my uncle spent decades in the fry business - if you ate a french fry in a QSR anywhere west of the Mississippi anywhere from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s, there's a strong likelihood he was responsible for growing the potatoes. There was far more technology, competition, and corporate espionage than one might expect for such a seemingly dull product. And, historically there was market segmentation too - QSR vs consumer, fries vs hash browns vs tots, things like sweet potato fries were an altogether different deal. Has there been consolidation in agriculture? Of course - but that's been going on for decades, and there's a reason one of the biggest players is named Con[solidated]Agra[culture]. Industry (QSRs, for example) expect consistency and timeliness, where the companies that could grow and consolidate the fastest beat out the regional players - decades ago. So while the author makes many factual observations, it's not clear why this article is timely for today rather than a couple decades ago when the war was actually being fought.

On the trivial point of view, I've never get why don't people just buy cheap potatoes, peals them, slice them, and finally fry them. If you're not clever enough to do that be not surprised to be abused by a cartel.

This is the "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" comment, but about potatoes.

We should all do our part to stop perpetuating the meme about that comment, which is pretty unfair.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42392302

People really need to stop bringing this up. We've got billionaires mocking this guy. The OpenAI CEO tried to make an example of "haters" out of him.

https://zedshaw.com/blog/2018-03-25-the-billionaires-vs-bran...

This isn't right, "good sport" or not. It doesn't reflect well on this community.

I needed to triple check if I was in a time loop, but I guess that's just the he icing on the joke. in that sense: "why not just rcs? much simpler."

Dropbox really is bad and didn’t deserve to be successful. Its success is more a product of ZIRP than a comment about its utility. Why do we act like this “lore” of HN is something we all have to refer to to prove how “wrong” we were?

Saying that Dropbox is bad is the second coming of the original meme saying it’s trivial.

Yall will never learn.

Self flagelation because we can't imagine any other future. "The way things are is the only way things could have ever been" - you, implicitly.

So tired of folks who uncritically think "this is the best way that things could have been". Voltaire literally wrote a whole book called "Candide" which tries to call out this exact thought-cliche.

You can't have it both ways. Either Dropbox is trivial and should have been replaced, or it's not and deserves its success.

I think people think that comment is wrong because ner-ner Dropbox was in fact a big success, and just because it's _possible_ to do implement something on your boutique computer doesn't mean it won't have value for people who can't do that.

[I totally agree if Microsoft had more vision and were competing on an OS that actually worked better for the owner of the computer in 2007, they wouldn't have ceded core parts of the computer's function to some two-bit VC-fuelled bodgers]

But to be the comment is wrong because - well - it wasn't and it isn't trivial to run a version control system on top of a network filesystem! Synchronous filesystems over the internet are awful. If the commenter had ever tried this for more than about 2 hours they'd find it hangs on the first network wobble, and probably loses data.

Anyhow we're getting off-topic. Do you think French fries deserve their success?

Given that Trump seems hellbent on taking Canada I'd say that its worth it just for Americans to fix their French fries norms and make them "worth their success".

Dropbox was an excellent useful little app when it first released. It absolutely deserved to be successful. Back then seamless file synchronization was unheard of, and laptops weren't too useful so it was the only reasonable option.

But HN was wrong and Dropbox was quite successful. Their "deservedness" is irrelevant, the fact they actually did the thing is all that matters.

I'm not sure why on HN of all places people would think that it's more efficient for millions of people to do work by hand rather than just having it done by machine at scale.

Doing it properly is quite a bit of work. You want at least two frys, preferably 3 or 2 and par-boiling. With cutting and other work it is lot of effort. And then if you don't want to deal with large amount of fat and instead use oven or air fryer for something passable.

Whilst you can do all sorts of variations making basic chips for a casual meal is really straightforward. Just chop up some potatoes, coat them in oil and wack them in the oven at 200C for 30-40 minutes. Works just as well with sweet potatoes as well. Everything else is to an extent gilding the lily which you might want to do at home if you're entertaining or like things a certain way but isn't strictly necessary.

Those aren’t fries, they’re bad roast potatoes.

vs buying frozen french fries --- which takes 10 mins on a countertop airfryer.

It's not that people don't know how to fry from fresh potato, it's just that the time it takes to do so is a lot. For restaurants especially, frozen is also just more cost-effective after accounting for labour.

I totally buy that for a commercial kitchen particularly going to the lengths in the sibling article but at home you're usually cooking a bunch of stuff and in general will be taking longer.

Also the vast majority of that time is fire and forget since it's just doing its thing in the oven. Yesterday for example I made fish and chips for my family of four and made chips peeled, cut, par-boiled and twice fried in as long as it took to prep and cook the fish, make a salad and heat up some baked beans. Which is a heck of a lot more active than the easiest way to do it but hardly this huge time sink.

I suspect choice at home is more expectations and lifestyle related.

>I totally buy that for a commercial kitchen particularly going to the lengths in the sibling article but at home you're usually cooking a bunch of stuff and in general will be taking longer.

Except its totally the opposite in reality. A commercial kitchen is much better equipped to do all of that and probably doesn't also have to do it while managing children or having just gotten home from work...

> Yesterday for example I made fish

Good for you. What I fail to see you analyze in all your reasoning is what it would be like for someone that is *not* you.

While I do that from time to time, and even sometimes tastes "better" is definitively another taste, and much less convenient, which the time to peel and cut, you are look at 1Hs of work, vs. 10 to 20 min.

Wow, imagine what would happen if this information made its way to the public!

I used to think so, but then I got fever and just decided to peel my potatoes, cut them finely, put some butter and salt on top and put that in the oven.

When you can do that, there's no point in making french fries though.

I heard there's also some vinegar baths involved or something like that?

But yes, lots and lots of work.

According to this, frozen tastes better. And house made fries take a lot of kitchen space.

https://www.foodandwine.com/chefs-favorite-frozen-french-fri...

I'm not sure how a knife and a cutting board take up a load of space in a home kitchen

I'd argue that the quality of a fry/chip does depend on the type of potatoes used. My experience is frozen fries are mediocre at best.

Even on a commercial scale, its a peeling machine and a cutting/chipping machine, no worse than a mixing machine for making dough or similar industrial kitchen machines.

> My experience is frozen fries are mediocre at best.

Probably depends how they’re cooked, see Chris Young’s video as an example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw--NLjZBNk&t=15s

I think the issue on a commercial scale is the sheer volume of fries you need to make and store continuously versus the benefit to the end result over frozen.

Probably the reason is that making your french fries "from scratch" (at least in a high-wage country like the US) would be much more expensive than buying frozen french fries, even at "cartel prices"?

I value my time more highly than that. I am quite happy to pay someone else to save me that labour.

Secondly, frozen fries aren't just sliced potatoes. They're a potato that is very precisely bred and grown specifically to make fries that is then blanched, coated in a specific mix of starches and part fried. Unless you're Heston Blumenthal, you aren't going to re-create that product in your own kitchen.

Exactly. Especially when frozen fries are so cheap anyway.

I make potato chips far more frequently than handmade fries because chips are much faster, end to end. Even with a french fry cutter to speed up the process.

Yeah, it tastes better, especially with garden-fresh potatoes, but usually the juice just ain't worth the squeeze!

I've made good french fries. It's not that hard. It certainly doesn't require one being Blumenthal.

It does, however, take too much advanced planning and frankly it's not worth the hassle of cleaning up. That said, I don't think it's really worth the hassle to fry frozen fries either - and even convection baked they're meh.

I cook all the time, mostly from scratch, but I keep frozen french fries in the freezer for very quick 'junk' meals, and more particularly because I don't in any way want to have deep-ish oil boiling my kitchen, for safety and odour reasons.

On a trivial point of view, I never understand why some people don't get that other people's existences diverge from their own experience... .

What's the point of even living in a society if you have to do everything yourself? This is no fix to cartels and corruption.

I’m not going to spend an hour cooking to save $3.

This, but why french fry them? A modestly-skilled cook can prepare potatoes in plenty of different ways. Many of which are easier (at small scale) than french frying.

One could also ask: Why eating potatoes at all... you can have a heathy diet without potatoes. I think the answer is: because people like fried potatoes?

Why fry them at all? Just boil them with the skins on.

But in al seriousness, you fry them because you want to eat fries, not mashed potatoes, today...

>If you're not clever enough

Ah yes, the people without the time to homemake fries are simply dumb, that's all. No worries about all the people suffering, they're just dumb.

Because I hate cooking.

It takes time and it smells.

You don't have ventilation above your stove?

Where I live cheap frozen pommes frites costs about the same per kilo as washed good quality fresh potatoes, and personally I think slicing and putting them in the oven with butter, salt, black pepper and herbs is much tastier than fries. To me it's worth the effort.

> You don't have ventilation above your stove?

My stove fan vents straight back into the room. Anecdotally maybe 75% of friends whose stoves I've observed do the same thing.

It's a travesty as far as I'm concerned, but there you are.

(I live in an apartment; otherwise you can bet I would have done something about it before now.)

Recirculating ranges are all the rage these days for cheap installations, but they're only usable with lightly smelling cooking. They just have a metal grid that filters and stops grease (which you have to wash often enough) and a carbon filter that lasts a random amount of time.

If you didn't check and put one yourself, you might not even have a carbon filter at all.

But in all cases this setup is totally insufficient for frying things without stinking the whole place.

> My stove fan vents straight back into the room.

Yes, unless you have equal amounts of outside air entering your domicile, a vent leading outside is not effective. A recirculating vent, however, still has a filter.

Hood filters capture airborne grease, smoke, steam, heat, odors, and other substances that are produced during cooking under the hood. Without the proper hood filter, your kitchen will be filled with airborne particles you don’t want your staff breathing! [0]

0. https://www.hoodfilters.com/hood-filters.html

That's insane. There aren't regulations around this where you live?

I really doubt there are regulations around this where you live. Recirculating vents are only going to grow more popular as they're now often built into your electric/induction hob.

OK, here's a portion of it: https://www.boverket.se/sv/PBL-kunskapsbanken/regler-om-bygg...

Not leading away moisture from the kitchen when cooking doesn't sound like a good idea to me but I'm just a child of a craftsperson working with these kinds of things, not one myself. Except if you live in like a hut with a lot of openings or something, but I'm kind of assuming this is about apartments and houses with isolation and so on.

I do, and frying things is not a problem for me. I was explaining why people don't do it: not everyone has a perfect kitchen and in fact, most people have impractical and inadequate kitchens with bad ranges, little space, too much clutter, etc.

Here in Belgium people just go to the nearest fry shop for their fries, they're better than home fried and it's easier and faster.

Since I'm not Belgian myself, I cut my potatoes into cubes and fry them in duck fat with rosemary instead. It's a whole other level of stink though.

If the landlord doesn't provide a safe, adequate kitchen there ought to be a legal way to force them. In case the legal way is lacking there are other forms of force.

There's nothing unsafe about a recirculating "vent." It's an annoyance, nothing more.

If you read the comment I responded to you'll see that it specifically is about unsafe, inadequate kitchens. Bring your complaint there instead.

Do you mean this kind of thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasselback_potatoes

No, I meant swedish style wedges, but hasselbackspotatis is quite tasty too. Takes a bit more preparation however.

Something like this:

https://www.swedishfood.com/swedish-food-recipes-side-dishes...

Smells due to the fry oil. If you have a range vent, frying under it helps significantly.

Related: why is it so hard finding a house with a range hood (and not the useless recirculator with carbon filter)?

Well it does require a vented pipe through your roof, and the people subcontracted for installing kitchen cabinetry and appliances are often coming in long after all the plumbing, HVAC, and roofing guys are gone who are going to have the ladders, be in the ceiling, and have the tar or vent pipe on hand needed to install a roof vent, and it is more of a pain if the stove isn't centered between joists and rafter beams.

Now none of that is a great excuse, it isn't that hard to do, but with how most buildings are subcontracted out piece by piece for every little part, and how some things like the kitchen appliance location is not super well finalized until cabinetry is actually installed, nobody before the cabinetry wants to take the responsibility of is positioning and the cabinetry guys are not expected or expecting to install such features.

It is time, expense, and the liability of punching a hole in the roof before someone decides they want the stove on the other side of the room, or coming in months afterwards and punching a hole in a brand new roof as someone not the roofer. If everything is well established in the blueprints and nobody is going to be changing their mind, or if one guy/company is doing 90% of the work themselves its not a problem. But often things are changed kitchen wise after most of the house is built or is done by 10+ different contractors, none of which want to be held responsible later on for it. Often one company does the structure, another the roof, another the siding, another the drywall, another the plumbing, another the electrical, another hvac, another cabinetry, etc, and only the plumbing and furnace vents are going to be putting holes in the roof which happens long before any finished features like the cabinetry is put in.

Weird, here in the netherlands you'll be hard pressed to find a kitchen that does not have a hood that exhausts to outside.

However currently there is a movement to (more expensive, luxury) solutions that do not have a vent hood and instead vent through a recirculation filter (Bora).

Could be a code thing.

I think it just has to do with a complete lack of building code requiring them so they are a total afterthought. I also feel many people dont really cook at home anymore so even less reason to have one installed.

However, two friends who love to cook or have an SO who does have had full outside vented range hoods installed when they remodeled. One is so serious they have a commercial hood over a 6 burner stove. That guy brings his own lunch almost daily complete with their own fresh baked bread. His SO has a library of cookbooks and enough kitchen equipment to feed an army.

You can go out sidewall in fact I'm pretty sure that is very common.

Actual range hoods mess with ventilation, so it's easier for builders to stick a recirculating one and not have to worry about ventilation imbalance.

There's also the belief that it will somehow break the main ventilation motor because of the large volume of air forced through it. But it shouldn't actually be a problem.

In Belgium you still have those "french fries vans" ("baraque a frites", which are not necessarily vans btw -- they can be little prefab structures) and there's a difference between the traditional ones, where potatoes are still pealed and sliced, by hand (giving fries all of uneven sizes) and the industrial ones, using factory-made fries. Of course the real traditional ones are better. And some shall proudly display a sign saying: "Ici on coupe les pommes de terre a la main" ("Here we slice the potatoes by hand").

Due to cholesterol and LCL level through the roof (as in: doctor hadn't seen that in decades saying it became extremely rare nowadays to be that bad), sadly since a year I can't anymore. I used to love these greasy full carbs but then the stroke ain't far for me so... I'm now following a very strict diet and thankfully my levels are slowly coming down :-/

P.S: FWIW my mother-in-law still does it at home the traditional way.

For context: Belgian fries are traditionally fried in animal fat, which makes them even worse for your cholesterol level than fries fried in oil (but also gives them a unique taste). In Germany it isn't even allowed to offer this version in a restaurant...

The main problem I see with frying in animal fat is, the already small selection of vegetarian food at most restaurants could be 0, after you also remove fries as an option.

Is this the case in the Netherlands as well? The street vendor cone of frites with satay sauce I had in Amsterdam was one of the best fry experiences I've had.

Are you saying that in Germany you are legally prohibited from selling potatoes fried in animal fat?

Well... actually not, turns out that what I wrote above was just hearsay, I couldn't find any hard evidence to back it up. It doesn't have to be legally prohibited however - Germans also have other regulations, e.g. you can't call your Döner Kebab a Döner Kebab if it contains more then 60% mincemeat (the rest has to be sliced meat).

> fries all of uneven sizes

I'm sure they're delicious, but seriously. Buy a french fry cutter and slice up a whole potato in one motion!

This is the Store of Value model. All centralized data platforms (like PotatoTrac mentioned here) enable it.

In an ideal world they should enable Flow of Value models.

If you are building data platforms, think about features that enable Flow. eg ONDC

It is impossible for me to take this seriously as a social justice issue, but I do want to point out that according to this article, Lamb Weston (the main character in this Jacobin piece) makes some of the best possible fries, and that even high-end places just order them ("you can't make them better yourself"). Which makes some sense, given Dave Arnold and Kenji Lopez-Alt's investigations into optimal fries (the best fries are frozen).

Also: you can buy them yourself. You just fry them straight from frozen. I haven't tried; I don't need to know for sure that I can make perfect fries in my house with zero effort.

https://www.foodandwine.com/chefs-favorite-frozen-french-fri...

Lamb Weston frozen fries are the best, but they are expensive at $5 odd dollars a bag.

> "We believe the claims are without merit and intend to vigorously defend our position."

What makes a defence vigorous?

Not the most important takeaway from the article but I’m personally a bit surprised that frozen potatoes are distributed by just 4 companies. Given the vast difference in French fries taste and quality across establishments I would’ve guessed that there were dozens of various vendors

I air-fry frozen Ore-Ida fries a lot. All of them have added sugar EXCEPT for curly fries (for some unknown reason). So I only buy curly fries because they have 18.5% fewer calories.

Lamb Weston's frozen fries are amazing though.

The article suggests the Trump government will continue with regulation and lawsuits for price fixing. Hasn't Trump promised deregulation? Why then would they think the current trajectory of regulation would continue? Won't they just pay Trump to allow the price-fixing, and maybe get some more advertising for fries in the oval office?

> Hasn't Trump promised deregulation?

Right alongside with promising to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of his winning the election, sure. (As far as I can tell, that promise was broken.)

You can count on Trump following up on deregulation. This, tax cuts and environmental protections rollback are coming.

I count on Trump doing what's best for big businesses that have his ear.

I fully expect tax cuts and environmental fuckery... but I also expect anti-competitive big business cartels to have a freer reign when Lina Khan is no longer FTC chair.

I think you answered your own question, right?

They got nothing on Microsoft.

The complacency of regulators is staggering.

The French fryers certainly give a new meaning to embrace, extend, extinguish.

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