Peel Tech - The Company

Peel Tech is a family business founded in 2013 by Malcolm Wood of Fife and now ably assisted by his wife, Arlene and two sons Nathan and Matthew.

Here is Malcolm’s story about how he invented Peel Tech – the birth of a revolutionary Filtration System

Back in 2013 I was on tea duties for the family.  So I thought ‘Keep it easy, chips and salad”.   So I grabbed some salad and some chips.  The chips that all the wholesalers in the UK used at that time were imported from Holland and Denmark.  No one in the UK was producing fresh chips.  So, I made dinner, served it up and asked the family what they thought of the chips.  Fine they said, total rubbish I said.

The next morning I had the idea to buy a chipper and started doing fresh-cut chips using local potatoes.  In our first week we used 2 bags of potatoes and now I am happy to say that we are up to an Artic Load every fortnight.  That’s a lot of chips to get peeled.  The chips are triple washed and de-starched, all organically treated and the best news of all, they are Fat-Free.

But, there was a problem.  My Dad turned up at the warehouse and said “Son, you're going to block the drains with all that starch, potato peeling and micro peeling”  I thought, no problem, it’s not going to happen but a week later he was right as I was clearing the drains and hoping he wasn’t going to pop round the corner and tell me “I told you so”

I looked in the market to find out what was available to go onto the back of the potato peeler to catch the starch and peelings BEFORE they hit the drains.  The only thing on the market was £80k, 15 metres long and 5 metres wide but it still put starch down the drains.  The only other solution was what Chip Shops use which is a basket but this still let 58% of the peelings go down the drain.

So I got stuck in with buckets and pipes, boxes and containers and after 8 months came up with version 1.   It still wasn’t right.  It was still overflowing and the starch was still coming back into the peeler, causing overflows.   It was some mess.  Imagine an old-fashioned top-loading washing machine filled with sludge – that’s what it was like. 

And then I had my Eureka moment one Saturday night/ Sunday morning at 2 am.  I jumped up shouting to my wife “I’ve got it” Threw on some clothes, jumped into the van and drove to the warehouse and started peeling potatoes again.  I tried out my ideas and by Monday morning I’m at a local fabrication plant and within 2 weeks we had cracked it with pipe and jet systems and Peel Tech was born.  All the starch, sludge, waste, and peel was going in one end, and coming out the other end was nice clean water that could be recycled or passed into the drainage system with no risk of blockages.

We have continued to grow steadily and supply our technology not just to Chip Shops but to a much wider range of users.  Watch this space!