Terra Chips: deep fried exotic root vegetables in catering

Dug up in fields from New England to Costa Rica, millions of pounds of exotic root vegetables end up each year on a back street in Moonachie. Here, resting in the cool storage room of a 75,000-square-foot factory, the lowly roots begin a transformation.

They are washed, sliced, parboiled, fried and dried, turning into a delectable gourmet snack known as the Terra Chip. Terra Chips, and the team of 100 workers who make them, have called Bergen County home for the past three years.

The chip business began life in Manhattan about 15 years ago, the brainchild of two chefs who left a Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurant to form a catering business. The pair _ Dana Sinkler and Alexander Dzieduszycki _ took the concept of deep-frying exotic root vegetables to their high-end catering customers and the rest, as they say, is history.

The delicate colored chips were a hit; Saks Fifth Avenue wanted to sell them; and the caterers decided to give it a go.

"The initial reaction was good enough that they could set about getting some capital," said Carl Wolf, a production manager in Moonachie who worked with the chefs off and on in the early 1990s. "I don't think they ever dreamed of becoming food manufacturers at that point."

From a small operation in Brooklyn, the Terra Chips business grew

They experimented with some vegetables, notably celeriac and lotus root, before eventually settling on the mix found in their silver and black bags today: yuca; taro; taro colored with beet juice; parsnip; sweet potato; and batata, a sweet potato-like root.

In 1998, Terra Chips was bought by The Hain-Celestial Group, a publicly traded natural and organic products company based in Melville, N.Y., that recorded sales of $544 million in 2004.

These days, the majority of Terra Chip varieties _ about 65 percent _ are made in New Jersey with the rest produced at a plant in Washington State. More than 18 million pounds of chips are produced each year in Moonachie, according to Adam Levit, general manager of Hain-Celestial's snacks business unit.

More than 40 million pounds of raw product are delivered to the factory each year, according to company officials. Inside the storage room, crates stacked to the ceiling and filled with taro from the Dominican Republic give off an earthy scent.

Tubers of the type used to create Terra Chips can be inconsistent in size, Levit explains. And that means prepping by hand. Inside one room, three men expertly strip the dark brown skin from long pieces of yuca. Ramon Then has been working to make Terra Chips for 12 years. "It's a good job, hard, but good," Then said in Spanish.

Nearby, blue potatoes dropped into a par-boiler on their way to becoming Terra Blues, a potato chip familiar to anyone who rides JetBlue Airways, which hands out mini 1-ounce bags of the snack to travelers.

Terra Chips have expanded beyond the original mix, and the Moonachie plant makes 30 varieties, which include the blue potato chips, said Levit. Hain-Celestial doesn't provide segment results, but Levit said the Terra Chip unit is "very profitable." (In 1994, the chipmakers boasted $10 million in annual sales.)

Source