The idea arrived on a beach in Hawaii. In 2002, Ralph and Darcy Carney were sharing a bag of chips on vacation when they decided to make their own back home in Alaska, from potatoes grown there. After returning home, they built a chip-testing lab in their garage and began calling growers, grocers, suppliers, and marketers to learn whether such a supply chain could be built at all. Alaska Chip Company, now run out of a plant in Anchorage, still tells its story with the same challenge from back then: “They said we couldn’t make a chip with Alaska potatoes… but we did.” Production began in July 2003 with two items, the lightly salted Alaska Chip and the barbecue Grizzly Chip.
The hard part was never the frying. It was the potato. “Selecting the right variety is important for achieving a hearty and delicious snack,” the company explains, because sugar content and moisture determine how a slice cooks in hot oil. So Carney looked north to Palmer, in the Matanuska Valley, where “the valley is filled with fertile fields carved out by glaciers that left behind the perfect medium for growing spuds,” the company wrote. Alaska Business reported in 2014 that Ralph approached grower Ben VanderWeele, who handed him half a dozen varieties to test, and that once Carney selected a variety, VanderWeele Farm grew that variety exclusively for the chip company. The magazine described the operation as “one of the few agriculture processing plants located in Alaska.”
Photo Courtesy Alaska Chip Company
The farm has deep roots in the valley. Ben and Suus VanderWeele immigrated from the Netherlands to Palmer in 1967 and began farming shortly after arriving, and Ben is a tenth-generation farmer. Potato Grower magazine reported in 2015 that the family farmed roughly 200 acres, 100 of them in potatoes, packed everything on-site, sold all of it within Alaska, and had brought all three of their children back to the family farm. Ben VanderWeele told the magazine that the state’s Alaska Grown label carries real weight at the register, calling it “one of the most important things we have going for us.”…