WEST SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — There’s nothing quite like a baked Maine potato, and visitors of The Big E should know; they buy enough of them.
Officials with the Maine Potato Board recently attended the largest fair in the Northeast overseeing the baked potato booth in the Maine Building, which is part of the Avenue of States.
According to Don Flannery, executive director of the Maine Potato Board, about 83,000 baked potatoes are sold during the 17-day fair each year.
“That amounts to about two trailer loads,” Flannery said.
This year’s Superior potatoes were grown by Barry Campbell of Monticello and Irving Farms in Caribou.
“We buy the potatoes from the growers and sell them at The Big E,” said Flannery. “We sell them for $6, and they’re cooked right there. We have our own kitchen that’s built into the Maine Building. We re-did it back in 2001, and at that time, we had four convection ovens. Now we have six, and we have one of those ovens that comes off every 15 minutes and that’s how we bake our potatoes.”
While the Maine Potato Board staff oversees the booth, residents in Massachusetts are hired to serve the flavorful spuds.
“We hire local people. Last year we hired 62 people. You’ve got to have so many people to run the operation,” Flannery said. “They open the doors at 10 a.m. and they close at 9 p.m. so you don’t get many people that want to work that 11 hours. You have to have shift work, and it works out pretty well.”
The baked potatoes can be served plain or doctored in several ways including bacon bits, cheese, sour cream, butter, chives, and salt and pepper.
“Last year — through the course of the whole fair — we sold an average of 463 potatoes per hour, which is 7.7 per minute,” said Flannery. “An all-time attendance record was set at The Big E last year when 1,481,917 people visited the fair. Of that, we sold 5.8 percent of them a potato. We’re one of the biggest attractions at the fair.”
In 2013, the Maine Potato Board grossed $432,725 in baked potato sales.
“The potato sales at The Big E are a huge part of our budget,” said Flannery. “We could not run this operation that we run at the Maine Potato Board — at the level that we do and provide the services that we do — without that revenue.”
The Maine Potato Board has been selling baked potatoes at The Big E for decades.
“Under the setup we have there now, I’d say we’ve been doing it that way for nearly 30 years,” Flannery said. “Before that, the board always had a smaller presence there. We used to do some french fries and different things, but it was on a much smaller scale. Now it’s turned into quite an operation.”
Over the years, Flannery has seen many of the same people coming back for a Maine potato.
“Some of it is tradition. Because we’ve been there so long, we’ll see people that are in line saying, ‘The first thing we do is come and get a Maine potato’ or ‘We never leave the fair without having a Maine potato.’ They’ll have their grandkids in tow, so it’s kind of a family tradition,” he said. “They love the flavor of it and it’s something they enjoy. Even at $6 a potato, it’s probably one of the more inexpensive food items on the fairgrounds. People have a very positive response to the product and they ask what stores they can buy it in.
“We started this as a way to promote the Maine potato, and while that’s still a major part of why we do it,” said Flannery, “we have taken the opportunity to parlay onto that a revenue source for the organization. The Big E is the biggest promotional event we can do in the Northeast. That fair gets people from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and the amount of people from New York and Pennsylvania that go there is amazing. It gets us a lot of exposure and it’s something we look forward to.”
In addition to Flannery, others helping staff the booth include Steve Belyea, Tim Hobbs and Jeannie Tapley.
