Blair Richardson leads Potatoes USA, a trade group looking for new opportunities for U.S. potatoes. He says that they also have to be concerned about misinformation about potatoes that filters to not only consumers but health care providers.
He says one of their top priorities is to combat misinformation about potatoes and spread the news that they are a healthy vegetable made for a balanced diet. They’re doing this by staying ahead of some emerging trends in the food industry.
Potatoes USA is developing an Artificial Intelligence system to help its team field misinformation about potatoes on social media. They believe they’re the first ag organization to make this type of investment and plan to roll out the AI system in March. It had a $500K price tag. And it will cost roughly $75-100K per year to maintain. Richardson says it will bring a return on investment because they won’t have to rely on so much manpower to monitor social media.
They will mostly use the system to find misinformation about potato nutrition across all platforms (starting on Twitter/X) and use the system to create a response based on a database of potato nutrition research.
In addition, Potatoes USA’s state-of-the-art kitchen lab is hosting training for healthcare professionals on the nutritional benefits of potatoes in a diet.