Chapter 1: Troyer Farm Products, Inc.
Troyer Farm Products
makes a wide variety of snack foods, but potato chips are its
mainstay. The profitability of the company depends, in part, on
producing the product at the lowest possible cost. This in turn means
getting the most chips possible from a potato.
But are all potatoes created equal? It is possible that one potato
of a given weight will yield more chips than another
of the same
weight.
If this is the case, the first potato will yield more output per
pound of input, and thus result in more profit for the firm.
But how can two potatoes of the same weight yield a different
amount (weight) of potato chips? The answer is that more of the
weight in one potato may be due to water, which will disappear during
cooking. One way to measure this is to consider the
specific gravity of the
potato, which gives the mass of the potato compared with the mass of
a similar volume of water. A higher specific gravity means more
potato per pound, and less water - and therefore more potato chips
and greater profits.
Troyer tested this theory by comparing the specific gravities of
24 batches of potatoes with the amount of potato chips that each
batch yielded.
There were two types of potatoes selected for this study, Atlantic
and Monona. Atlantic potatoes tend to have a higher specific gravity
than the Monona, and also yield a much higher amount of potato chips.
The table and graph show the data.
