Simplot’s Grand Forks plant adapts to trends

That Simplot Foods plant that Grand Forks residents drive by along Gateway Drive has a sort of permanence. It’s been there fora half century.

Inside, the Simplot plant is a changing, evolving place that works with regional farmers to anticipate and meet the trends of a changing food industry. It both follows and anticipates the links between farmers of the northern Red River Valley and the appetites of complicated markets.

Simplot employs about 400 people here who run the plant around the clock in four shifts. It largely produces frozen potato products, selling them to a variety of customers, and under numerous labels.

Simplot is one of the three big French fry manufacturers in North America — the other two being ConAgra Foods Lamb Weston and McCain Foods Ltd.

Founder J.R. Simplot is known as the inventor of the frozen French fry, for his work as early as the 1940s — a process taken to a bigger scale in cooperation with McDonald’s in the 1960s. McDonald’s remains one of Simplot’s primary customers, and is especially noted for its high quality standards. Simplot has about 900 employees in its Boise, Idaho, headquarters area.

The company has seven factories and is in the process of building a 380,000-square-foot plant in Caldwell, Idaho. That plant will go on line in the spring of 2014 and will replace three existing plants in Caldwell, Aberdeen and Nampa all in Idaho.

J.R. Simplot hasn’t divulged the cost of the new plant, but estimates are around $330 million. Founder J.R. Simplot built a potato dehydrating operation in Caldwell in 1941 and converted the plant to process frozen potatoes in the early 1950s.

In Grand Forks, a separate operative built the original potato processing plant in 1961. Simplot bought it in 1981 and has made numerous revisions.