South Australian potato producers Pye Group have officially opened their $45 million potato packing facility — the largest of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.
The massive packing facility in the southern Mallee has allowed the company to more than double their production capacity.
The company mainly sells fresh potatoes and received $2 million from the State Government's Regional Growth Fund to help build the facility.
The Pye Group began relocating operations from Virginia in the Adelaide Plains to Parilla in November 2019, in order to reduce the costs and emissions of transporting produce from its farms.
Deputy general manager Renee Pye said she hoped the move would also improve the freshness of its produce.
"We do 90 to 95 per cent of our potato growing out here and we were shipping up to 12 trailers of potatoes every day to Virginia, which didn't make sense as that's about 3.5 hours on the road," she said.
Ms Pye said more than half of the company's 450 employees were employed at the new site.
"We wash and pack about 300 tonnes of potatoes a day, about six days a week," she said.
Ms Pye said the facility was equipped with state-of-the-art machinery to wash, rinse, polish, cool and grade potatoes.
Each potato gets washed about five times, while the grading machine takes about 30 pictures of each spud to sort it into more than a dozen different packing lines.
Despite the wetter year leading to supply issues for potatoes, Ms Pye said local growing conditions had been good.
"We've been able to pack all the product that we had in the ground and distribute it … to the supermarkets around Australia," she said.
Community boost
With workforce shortages across many industries, Ms Pye said the company had made a significant investment to attract and retain staff.
The Pye Group upgraded a backpackers hostel in Parilla to accommodate 40 people from Papua New Guinea through the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme.
The company also built 27 houses in the nearby towns of Pinnaroo and Lameroo to support existing employees to relocate from Adelaide.
"I think they were probably keen to stay with the same company that they had been with in the previous years," she said.
"I also think some people were actually looking to come out to the country instead of being in the city — they were keen for some fresh air, to get involved in a more tight-knit community and raise their children out here."
Lameroo Forward chair Nicole McMahon said it had established a welcoming group to help the influx of people integrate into the local community.
"They have put together a beautiful book, detailing all the services in the area and we had someone personally deliver those," she said.
Sales clerk Priya Harwani, who moved with her supervisor husband Nick and four-year-old daughter into one of the new homes, said the family was enjoying country life.
"People have been very kind," she said.
"It is a very peaceful place in Lameroo."
