Sweet Potatoes have soared in popularity in recent years. Jamie Oliver has even described them as one of his food heroes, so as we add sweet potatoes to our repertoire of foodservice products we thought we’d search the internet for some facts and figures about this rather wonky-looking veg.

1. Sweet potatoes are native to Central and South America and are one of the world’s oldest vegetables. They’ve even been traced as far back as 10,000 years!
2. They were brought to Europe by Christopher Columbus in 1492.
3. Although they are distantly related and share many nutritional attributes with “normal” potatoes, unlike normal potatoes, sweet potatoes count towards your five-a-day.
4. Also unlike normal potatoes, you can eat sweet potatoes raw – anyone seen the spiralizer?
5. A recent sweet potato food trend saw foodies putting their sliced sweet potatoes in the toaster.
6. 80 million tonnes of sweet potatoes are grown in China annually. That’s almost 90 per cent of the sweet potatoes grown worldwide!
7. Sweet potatoes are an excellent source of Vitamin A, C, thiamin, manganese, potassium and fibre, as well as a lot of other healthy stuff!
8. There are about 6,500 varieties of sweet potatoes worldwide with names ranging from Carolina Ruby, Apache, Beauregard and Jewell. The latter two being the most commonly grown variety in the US.
9. When we think of sweet potatoes we think of rich, orange flesh but sweet potatoes can also be bright purple or even white on the inside.
10. Despite normally relying on warm, dry conditions for growing, sweet potatoes are now being grown in the UK (albeit in very small numbers).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato

http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=64

http://www.all-about-sweet-potatoes.com/sweet-potato-varieties.html