Reducing waste in french fries production means making the most of every potato that enters the line. The biggest losses come from whole-fry rejection during sorting, where defective and good product are removed together. Defect removal applications like S-Blade remove only the defect, increasing yield without compromising quality.
The yield gap in conventional sorting
In a typical french fry production line, a significant share of usable product never reaches the freezer. Optical sorting rejects the whole fry as soon as a defect is detected, even when only a small part is affected. The variability of raw material makes this worse: skin issues, discoloration and bruises arrive in waves, depending on storage, season and supplier. The result is unnecessary yield loss.
Cut out the defect, keep the rest
S-Blade is built around a simple shift: from rejection to removal. Deep learning detects the defects and S-Blade cuts them out, while the good portion of the fry continues down the line. For high-volume french fries plants, this raises usable yield from the same input, without changing upstream operations.
Throughput up to 20 metric tons per hour. Cost of ownership estimated at no more than €45K per year.
A waste perspective on cost of ownership
Waste is not only product loss. It includes labour for sorting, maintenance hours, energy spent on rejected product and the operational overhead of unstable output. S-Blade is engineered for predictable, controlled costs, with cost of ownership estimated at no more than €45K per year. It needs little maintenance, so uptime is high. That uptime matters even more than the low maintenance cost itself: when the line stops, fries are removed whole, and every minute of downtime is expensive. Higher yield, high uptime and lower operating overhead together change the economics of the line.
