Potato Farmer Peter Scott from the Otways region in Victoria, Australia, could soon become the region's most famous farmer since another Otways potato farmer, Cliff Young, won the Sydney to Melbourne ultramarathon in 1983.
Peter Scott expects to make up to a million packages of purple potato chips this year. And like Cliffy, Mr Scott's quest hasn't been a short sprint. He said it took six years of slog to find the purple potato variety most suited to be kettle-cooked to make crispy chips.
According to him, the rave reviews from taste-tests with locals and tourists spurred him on, although "a lot of them were suspicious that we'd dyed the potato. They didn't believe that a potato could be that purple."
Mr Scott said, after knockbacks from two Australian crisp manufacturers (one deemed the crisps "too dark"), the third agreed to a trial run of 12,000 packets last winter, which sold out in five weeks.
Sales from 91,000 packets produced in December are tracking well and they aim to produce 100,000 more by March and a total, for 2017, of between 750,000 and a million packets.
Mr Scott says he rejected a sales deal with a major supermarket, because it wanted control over ingredients and cooking methods. He also feared it would whittle his profit margin, so he has gone "minimalist" with distribution, helped by a Geelong wholesaler.
The chips are currently sold at about 10 Melbourne outlets including Toscano's greengrocers in Kew and LaManna supermarket in Essendon Fields; and in 12 stores around the Otways.
