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JULY 9, 1:19 P.M. Québec Parmentier, Québec City Finally, I'm here, in Québec City, the heart of French Canada. Now, if I can get by on the six words of French I learned from Beauty and the Beast, all will be well. I'm welcomed warmly and ushered into the offices of Québec Parmentier, the biggest marketer of potatoes in the province. I sit down with CEO Pierre Chouinard, general manager Audrey Boulianne, and seed sales manager Laurence Côté to get a brief overview of the company and outline our week touring Quebec's potato industry. Québec Parmentier is a grower-owned company that was formed in 2012 in an effort to better produce and sell high- quality potatoes throughout the province and into the big Toronto and the major markets on the East Coast of the U.S. As Chouinard shows me a map of where potato farms are located across the fertile but enormous province, it's not difficult to imagine why growers would want to form a unified organization to get their crop to market. "All these growers are really far from the market," says Chouinard. "We've actually lost a lot of growers in the past 15 to 20 years because freight costs just got too high. So it was easy for me to explain to growers the vision we had to create this company. Together, they decided to join and form Québec Parmentier." In 2012, Parmentier marketed about 3,500 acres of potatoes. That number has grown to nearly 8,000 in 2019— roughly half the province's potato acreage. "The new generation of customers wants something sexy, tasty, convenient," says Chouinard. "Potatoes are sexy, and we want to set them up as a sexy product." JULY 9, 3:22 P.M. Sainte-Croix About a 45-minute drive from the Parmentier office is the home of André Gagnon, who owns and operates Progest 2001, a research farm dedicated to improving the potato industry in Quebec and throughout Canada. Gagnon is small, energetic and, it seems, boundlessly excited about potatoes. With an infectious smile, he gives me the grand tour. A couple hundred yards from the banks of the St. Lawrence River, obscured from view of drivers on the nearby highway by dense forest, sits Gagnon's greenhouse, where, he says, early-generation plantlets of over 100 potato varieties reside. Nearby fields Pièce de Résistance Marketing Quebec's vibrant potato industry Story and photos by Tyrell Marchant 16 POTATO GROWER | NOVEMBER 2019