"Any Hour of Ventilation Is Dehydration": What Omnivent Told the Global Potato Summit About Storing Potatoes in India

A Dutch system, an Indian partner in Gurugram

Omnivent is a Dutch maker of storage ventilation and climate systems. Van Groenewoud said the company began surveying Indian storage in 2008, concluded its systems had to be adapted to local conditions before they could work here, and now has about 400,000 tonnes of storage capacity in the country, storing to the end of December.

Ross Enterprises is the Indian half. The slide behind him gave the outline: established in 2015, corporate office in Gurugram, working in cold chain. Its solutions list runs from Omnivent agri cold stores and palletised frozen stores to wooden boxes, intake lines from the Dutch handling maker Bijlsma Hercules, grain silos and warehousing. Van Groenewoud said Ross was the first to hold a contract with PepsiCo that covered designing, building and operating a store as well as supplying the processing chain, which is what made it the partner Omnivent wanted.

The reason for a partner was put plainly. He travels 70 to 80 countries and cannot be in India ten times a year; the client speaks Hindi, Gujarati or Punjabi and he speaks Dutch; and, in his words, "you decide very late," which makes getting equipment here on time the hard part. More on that below.

Seven things he said, and what each means for an Indian store

The talk was short and quotable. These are his lines, taken from the recording, and what each means for a cold-store owner in Agra, Deesa or Hooghly.

Four hours a day, and why that number decides everything

The method he described starts outside the building. Omnivent collects climate data for the region where a store will stand, looks at the supply chain around it, and looks at the building itself, new or existing. Solar radiation on the walls at 35 to 40 degrees matters because it adds to the heat the system must remove, and removing heat means running hours. From that comes a heat-load calculation that fixes the cooling power needed to keep the fans to a few hours a day.

He took the obvious objection head on. Designing for minimum running hours "maybe increases your investment." His answer was the horizon: a system bought for 25 to 30 years, so the extra capital, spread across three decades of stored crops, "is maybe not that big." The three goals he named for every design were storage losses, product quality and energy efficiency, and he added that if a system would not serve those, "it could be that we will not sell it to you."

The potato was not grown for the cow

The sharpest passage was about how losses are counted. Over breakfast some years ago, he said, an Indian minister told him the sector's storage losses were only 2 percent, because whatever is not fit for processing goes to the cattle. His reply: "You don't grow the potato for the cow. It's grass, not a potato." The point was not the minister but the mindset. A reject fed to livestock is booked as zero loss when it is a loss of the whole processing price.

From there to the line he repeated: storage is not a hospital. It cannot restore what came in damaged, so the challenge he set the room was to improve quality before the store, and then to hold it. The pay-off he offered was seasonal: a store that carries the crop past the monsoon and the market's troughs to the end of the year.

On what to build, he was unfussy. Three kinds of system, he said, are already installed in India for the processing sector, and some of the parts can be made locally:

• Bulk stores with ventilation through the pile, the standard for processing potatoes held for months.
• Room-ventilated stores, where the existing building does more of the work.
• Box stores, with the crop in wooden boxes and the air moved around them.

And renovation of an existing building, with a new system inside it, "could be more financially interesting than building a new store."

Twenty tonnes an hour from 50 kg bags, and 80,000 boxes next year

The Netherlands is small enough, he joked, to cross by fighter jet in a minute and ten seconds; India is a country where Nashik to West Bengal is four days by road. The supply chain is the challenge, and the store's front door is where it lands. With Bijlsma Hercules, Ross has built an intake that unloads several tractors at once, empties 50 kg bags to bulk at about 20 tonnes an hour, grades, and fills a cell in three to five days. The target, "as a starting point," is ten to eleven months of storage.

Boxes were the growth line. Ross will build about 40,000 wooden storage boxes this year, he said, with the aim of 70,000 to 80,000 next year, alongside assembling Bijlsma intake lines in India. For a processor that is the box-versus-bulk decision arriving with local supply behind it, which is the question the NAPSO storage webinar takes up this week.

Decide early, then let the store report to you

His warning on timing applied, he stressed, to India "definitely" but to other regions too. A store is designed, then discussed, and by the time the order is placed it is four or five months before commissioning. Production time plus shipping from Europe, for parts not yet made here, does not fit in that window. The advice to the sector was one line: start planning early, so the equipment is in for this season "and not in two years."

Ross describes its own method as a four-P approach, and the slide behind him listed it as four pillars:

The last part of the talk was a film for OmniCuro, the control system that began, he said, as "a kind of simple computer" 25 to 30 years ago. His view of where storage goes next is that a store should tell its owner how it is performing rather than hand over data to analyse: "only providing you the necessary information that you need as a store owner or store manager." Simplicity by intuition, in his phrase, so the manager can concentrate on the job outside.

Three things he would have you do

• Ask any supplier for the running hours their design assumes. A number from a heat-load calculation on your site's climate is the difference between a store sized to rest and one sized to cope, and the difference shows up in weight.
• Price a renovation before you price a new build. If the building is sound, the system is the expensive part, and it can go into what you already own.
• Order in spring for next spring. Four to five months is not enough for imported equipment. The calendar, not the price list, is what catches Indian buyers.

Common questions about the talk