Spotlight: Potato Chips

While March 14^th is best known as Pi Day, the circular dessert shares the day with another popular snack food, the simple potato chip. Since the mid-1990s, National Potato Chip Day has been observed on 3/14. The potato chip is a truly American cuisine. Legend has it that potato chips were invented in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1853. Under one version of the story, a chef named George Crum, who worked at Moon’s Lake House on Saratoga Lake, became frustrated when a customer complained that his fried potatoes were too thick. In response, Crum sliced the potatoes extremely thin, fried them until they were crisp, and seasoned them with extra salt. Another version of the story identifies Crum’s sister Catherine Adkins Wicks, who worked alongside him in the kitchen, as the mastermind behind the fried snack. Under either theory, the customer loved them as did many others. The “Saratoga Chip” was born. Initially, Saratoga Chips were considered a delicacy and primarily served in restaurants and hotels. Jeweler Tiffany & Co. even created a luxury Saratoga Chip serving piece.   

This changed in the late 1800s/early 1900s when small businesses started producing and packaging potato chips for sale in grocery stores. Manufacturing advancements during the 1920s and 1930s allowed potato chips to be made faster, more consistently, and in larger quantities. Their popularity spread across the United States and around the world. Home delivery of potato chips became popular in the 1940s and 1950s. Pennsylvania based Charles Chips introduced neighborhood delivery routes using highly recognizable yellow trucks to bring tins of fresh potato chips, and eventually other snack food, directly to customers’ doors. During this time, potato chips closely resembled the original Saratoga Chips and were seasoned primarily with salt. An Irish company Tayto is credited with creating the first commercially produced flavored potato chips in 1954, when it introduced Cheese & Onion and Salt & Vinegar varieties.  

In 1967, Proctor & Gamble introduced “Pringles New Fangled Potato Chips” as a solution to common consumer complaints about traditional potato chips, that they were greasy, stale, and often broken in the bag. In 1956, Procter & Gamble had tasked chemist Fredric Baur with creating a chip that would solve these issues. Baur spent years developing a dough made from dehydrated potatoes and shaping it into the now‑famous Pringles “saddle” which allows the chips to stack neatly without breaking. He also designed the brand’s other iconic innovation: the cylindrical chip can. Baur was so proud of his creation that he requested his children bury his cremated remains in a Pringles can, which they did in 2008. 

Today’s potato chip industry is a multi‑billion‑dollar business. Large companies like Lay’s, Ruffles, Utz, and Pringles compete globally, while smaller regional brands continue to thrive. Mrs. Fisher’s Chips founded in 1932 in Rockford is one of the oldest chip manufacturers in the Midwest. The brand became known for its distinctive packaging and for offering varieties such as regular, rippled, barbecue, French onion, and dark chips, which are made from Russet potatoes that naturally fry darker due to a higher sugar content. Kitchen Cooked brand potato chips have been a Central Illinois favorite since the 1930s. Produced for decades in Farmington, Illinois, the brand’s identity was built around small‑batch processing based on a hand‑cooked, preservative‑free recipe.  Kitchen Cooked maintained a regional distribution network across Central and West Central Illinois and Eastern Iowa. After decades as an independent regional operation, Kitchen Cooked was purchased by Utz Brands in 2019. In 2022, Utz announced that chip production would be shifted out of Farmington. The historic manufacturing facility was repurposed into a distribution center.