India's Frozen Fry Belt: How Mehsana, Gujarat Became a McCain-vs-HyFun Battleground

Drive along the Ahmedabad-Patan highway through Mehsana district, Gujarat, and you're in the middle of India's frozen fry industry — not Punjab, not Uttar Pradesh, despite both growing far more raw potatoes. Gujarat is where India's two most significant frozen-fry processors actually built their plants, and the story of how they got there says a lot about where India's potato industry is headed next: away from the raw potato and toward the drive-thru.

McCain Foods — the Canadian company that's the world's largest processor of french fries — has been building India's frozen-food market since 1998. Its Mehsana plant, built for roughly CAD $18 million, sits in the Baliyasan cluster and has anchored the region's processing industry for a quarter-century. McCain didn't just build a factory and leave; "Project Shakti," its flagship community program, works across 20 villages in Mehsana and Kadi blocks specifically to improve livelihoods for women in the farming communities that supply the plant's potatoes — a sign of how tightly McCain's India operation is woven into the smallholder farming economy around it.

HyFun Foods didn't exist as a frozen-potato processor until 2015. A decade later, it's supplying Walmart, KFC, and Burger King out of a 20-acre integrated Gujarat facility with cold storage for 150,000 tonnes of potato — and it's now committing roughly Rs 850 crore to build three more plants in the state. HyFun isn't just processing; through its "HyFarm" initiative, it's put Rs 100 crore directly into strengthening its farmer supply chain, and has already procured around 300,000 tonnes of processing-grade potatoes through the program.

Two of India's biggest potato-processing bets landing in the same district isn't a coincidence. Mehsana has the growing conditions for processing-grade potatoes, the farmer-aggregation infrastructure to source at scale, and port proximity that matters as much for exports as for shipping fries to QSR chains across India. Once McCain proved the model would work there, it lowered the risk for everyone who came after.

India is already the world's second-largest raw potato producer. What's changing is what happens to that potato after harvest. A quarter-century-old multinational and a ten-year-old domestic challenger both scaling up processing capacity in the same corridor is a clear signal: India's potato story is shifting from "how much do we grow" to "how much of it do we turn into fries" — the same transition that made Belgium, a country of 11.5 million people, the world's #1 frozen fry exporter. India has the raw production base Belgium never had. Whether Gujarat's processing corridor can build the export infrastructure to match is the next chapter.