Business Notes: Food Processing

At Ore-Ida, the Boise affiliate of H.J. Heinz Co., they peela lotta potatoes -- about 6,000 tons a day. Traditional recipe: steam 900 lbs. of potatoes in a vast vat; release the steam so the skins drop off. Preparation time: two minutes. Drawbacks: you lose nearly a tenth of a tater with the skin and generate a dun-colored, viscous by-product, used as cattle feed.

Now there's a no-muss new method: using a $3 million combination of industrial-grade lasers, you can vaporize the skin right off the potatoes as they fly through a funnel at the rate of 1,800 a minute. This laser surgery for spuds, designed by researchers at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, works even better on tomatoes, a key commodity for catsup-making Heinz, which owns the still experimental technology. Ore-Ida won't update its recipe for peeling potatoes until the price of lasers, already declining, drops even more. Any commercial use of laser peeling is at least three to five years away. But even this state-of-the-art technology has got to be viewed as a godsend to the soldier facing KP.