In the manufacture of apple chips, whole apples are sliced in a commercially available centrifugal slicer and further processed through various stages, e.g., the commonly owned application of Glass et al., Ser. No. 484,488, filed Apr. 13, 1983, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,214,428. Also in the conventional manufacture of potato chips, potatoes are sliced in a similar commercially available slicer and then are further processed through frying, seasoning and packaging. In both of these processes, and others involving sliced fruit or vegetables, it is often necessary to arrange the slices in a single layer without overlap (called a "monolayer") for subsequent processing, drying, and/or seasoning steps. However, with slices exiting from a centrifugal slicer around the periphery thereof and more or less at random it has been a difficult and thought-to-be impossible task to provide an orderly monolayer of such vegetable or fruit slices. The random commingling of slices makes their organization into a monolayered arrangement a problem of great physical complexity. The complexity increases (perhaps exponentially) as slice rate increases.