Mart Frozen Foods opens Rupert plant for frozen baked potatoes

Processing equipment for frozen potato products

Mart Frozen Foods opened its Rupert, Idaho, facility on 2 October. The $65 million project provides 100,000 square feet for producing and packing frozen baked potatoes under the OH!Tatoes brand.

From an existing product to a new retail channel

The Mart Group's president and chief executive, Julian Critchfield, told Manufacturing Dive that the company had already made the product at a smaller Burley facility acquired with World Foods. That business had established distribution to commercial kitchens in Asia. OH!Tatoes was created in 2024 to bring the product to North American consumers, with work on the brand and distribution accompanying development of the product.

The Rupert opening links those activities to a larger manufacturing site. In practical terms, a retail launch involves both making the food and establishing how it reaches the customer. A new plant addresses the production side of that process; the brand and distribution arrangements give the output a route to market. The announcement describes these as connected parts of the expansion.

Investment and earlier financing

A June 2023 USDA Rural Development schedule lists a $19.6 million loan for The Mart Group under the Food Supply Chain Guaranteed Loan Program. The stated purpose was construction of a frozen potato processing facility and expansion of existing whole and diced frozen-potato production. That record concerns financing for infrastructure within the food supply chain. It describes a loan, not a grant.

The two amounts identify different things:

$65 million is the announced investment in the Rupert facility.
$19.6 million is the earlier loan amount recorded for the processing expansion.
The loan should not be added to the facility investment as though it represented a second factory.

The company's opening release says the site will create 80 full-time positions. That is the employment plan associated with the opening announcement, rather than a claim about the number of workers on every production shift.