SmartSpud records data about the journey your potatoes make from the field to storage to shipping.
A potato goes through quite a trek before it ever ends up on a store shelf. From growing in field to being harvested and trucked to a conveyor line and then loaded into a storage shed, all before it is sent back along that conveyor line to a packing facility. It’s a long journey and there can be a lot of bumps and bruises happen along the way which isn’t good for a perishable crop like a potato.
SmartSpud is trying to help reduce those bumps and bruises. The tracking device rides along with potatoes on their travels recording everything so that growers can adjust machine settings and keep their spuds as safe as possible. The SmartSpud sensor communicates using Bluetooth in real time to a Microsoft Surface tablet.
“What it tells you is what excessive impacts are you having to the potato species, each one has some different variables on that end,” Larry Doherty, chief operating officer of SmartSpud, explains in a Microsoft Teams interview. “It tells you when you’re exceeding threshold in terms of what can cause damage to the product.”
SmartSpud was initially developed 12 years ago in the Maritimes. At the time it was determined there was no sensor product available that acted and behaved like a real product — meaning it went through the entirety of a processing line. The initial product was developed and since then has been updated and expanded to the current SmartSpud device which was released in 2016.
“It helps (growers) by giving them visibility into their entire operation. Right from the moment that the product is removed from the field till it’s put in the truck that was brought into the warehouse. Right through till it leaves their facility to ensure that they’re optimizing everything that they do to ensure that potato incurs as little damage as possible,” Doherty says.
Heppell’s Potatoes in Surrey, B.C. started using SmartSpud a decade ago. The fresh potato farm wanted to have a better understanding of how their packing line worked and see just exactly where their spuds were being downgraded from number one to two due to bruising.
“We are starting to redo parts of our line — focusing on parts that create more bruising for the potatoes. Also, areas where we thought there was more bruising going on, and then finding out that those weren’t the areas. This allows us to have better information so we can put out a better-quality potato,” Tyler Heppell with Heppell’s Potatoes, says in a phone interview.
The SmartSpud is a blue and red egg-shaped device. It records even when not connected to the tablet and will update the data once connected to the tablet, similar to how a smart watch connects to a phone. The SmartSpud is rechargeable and has an eight-hour battery life, when not in data collection mode it will power down after 15 minutes. To find it when in use you can set off an alarm from the tablet.
The SmartSpud currently has a one-time cost of USD$8,000 which includes the sensor, tablet and lifetime access to the cloud portal.
“We do all the testing, communication testing, battery testing on the sensor, just basically application testing. We want to make sure that when that box arrives at your destination, it’s ready out of the box. All you got to do is turn the tablet on, it’s good to go,” Doherty explains.
