46 Fun Facts About Potato Chip

The earliest known potato chip recipe was printed in 1817 in a bestselling cookbook from which country?

England. Dr William Kitchiner's The Cook's Oracle told readers to cut potatoes 'in shavings round and round, as you would peel a lemon' and fry them in lard or dripping.

Legend credits the potato chip to a cook at Moon's Lake House in which New York resort town?

Saratoga Springs. The tale has a cook slicing potatoes paper-thin to spite a fussy diner in 1853, but historians note the Moon family did not even buy the Lake House until 1854.

A 1973 advertising campaign added which tycoon to the potato chip legend as the fussy diner?

Cornelius Vanderbilt. The ad came from a paper company that made chip bags, 120 years after the supposed meal, and the real Commodore had spent that summer touring Europe.

Which cook does legend credit with inventing the potato chip in 1853 to spite a customer who sent back his fries?

George Crum. Born George Speck, he really did cook at Moon's Lake House and later ran a restaurant of his own, but recipes for the chip had been in print for decades by then.

Before sealed bags arrived in the 1920s, grocers usually sold potato chips loose from glass cases or what?

Barrels. By the time shoppers reached the bottom the chips were stale and broken, the very problem the first sealed bags set out to solve.

In the 1920s, Frank Smith sold his crisps around London in greaseproof bags with what tucked inside?

A twist of salt. The pinch of salt came in a little paper wrap for buyers to sprinkle on themselves, and Smith's crisps are still sold that way today as Salt & Shake.

Which Irish company is widely credited with the world's first flavoured crisp, cheese and onion, in the 1950s?

Tayto. Joe 'Spud' Murphy's employee Seamus Burke experimented on little more than a kitchen table until the boss approved, and the flavour was soon a hit at home and abroad.

Smith's answered its rivals' cheese and onion with which flavour, launched nationally in 1967?

Salt and vinegar. Smith's tried the flavour out first through Tudor, its subsidiary on Tyneside, before taking it nationwide.

Which flavour, hailed in the trade press in 1955, was among the first seasoned potato chips sold in the United States?

Barbecue. An industry magazine called 'Bar-B-Q' seasoning the most sensational new development in the business, and sour cream and onion arrived beside it as America's other early flavour.

In the 1920s, Laura Scudder's workers took home sheets of what to iron into sealed potato chip bags?

Wax paper. The women ironed three sides shut at home and the bags were filled and sealed at her plant near Los Angeles, so the chips reached shoppers crisp instead of stale.

Kettle-cooked potato chips get their hard crunch from being fried how?

In small batches. The slices are cut thicker and each batch fries in cooler oil, which gives a harder bite than chips from a continuous fryer.

Which brand, started in 1980 by a man who sold his auto-parts business, popularised kettle-cooked chips in the US?

Cape Cod. Steve Bernard spent $3,000 on a cast-iron slicer, took a week's crash course in chip making and opened in a small shop in Hyannis on the Fourth of July.

In Britain and Ireland, what does the word 'chips' refer to?

French fries. Hence fish and chips: over there the thin fried slices are called crisps, a word that Pringles also uses on its American cans.

Which cereal maker bought Pringles in 2012 for about $2.7 billion?

Kellogg's. It swooped in after an earlier sale to Diamond Foods, the owner of Kettle Chips, fell apart amid questions over that company's accounts.

Which company launched Pringles in 1968?

Procter & Gamble. The soap giant knew edible oils from making Crisco, and set a chemist to work on a chip that would not turn up greasy, stale or broken.

The saddle shape of a Pringle is known mathematically as what?

A hyperbolic paraboloid. The double curve lets every crisp nest on the next, so they stack unbroken in a tube, the cure its designer wanted for bags of greasy, broken chips.

What last wish did Pringles can designer Fredric Baur leave his family?

Burial in one of his cans. His children laughed when he first raised the idea in the 1980s, but after he died in 2008 they placed some of his ashes in a Pringles can in the grave.

One theory says Pringles were named after what?

A street in suburban Cincinnati. Two of the firm's advertising staff are said to have lived on Pringle Drive, though a rival theory credits a Mark Pringle whose potato patent the company had cited.

Herman Lay started out in 1932 selling potato chips from what?

His Ford Model A. He was a route salesman for an Atlanta chip maker, and within a few years he had bought the ailing company and put his own name on the bags.

Which Wizard of Oz star was the face of Lay's potato chip adverts in the 1960s?

Bert Lahr. The man who played the Cowardly Lion became the brand's first celebrity spokesman once the newly merged Frito-Lay began selling its chips coast to coast.

In Mexico, PepsiCo sells its Lay's potato chips under which long-established local brand name?

Sabritas. PepsiCo bought the Mexican snack maker in the 1960s and, as with Walkers in Britain, kept the trusted local name on the bag instead of Lay's.

Which Lay's sub-brand, sold in a tall canister, was launched to compete with Pringles?

Lay's Stax. Frito-Lay took on Pringles in 2003 with a look-alike stacked crisp, swapping the rival's cardboard tube for a moulded plastic canister.

Walkers was founded in the 1940s in which English city, home to the world's largest crisp plant?

Leicester. Founder Henry Walker had moved there from Mansfield in the 1880s to take over a shop, and the firm never left: its plant now gets through 800 tonnes of potatoes a day.

What trade was the Walker family in before it founded Walkers crisps?

Butchery. Post-war meat rationing left the shop with nothing to sell by mid-morning, so the firm tried crisps instead, at first cut by hand and cooked in a fish fryer.

Which footballer did Walkers sign in 1994 to front its crisp adverts?

Gary Lineker. The joke was that a player so famously nice would steal crisps from children, and Walkers even put his name on a flavour, Salt & Lineker.

One of Ireland's best-known crisp brands became such a fixture that in 2010 its owner opened what?

A theme park. It opened near Ashbourne in County Meath with the brand's name over the gate, and kept it for a dozen years before being renamed Emerald Park.

Which brand overtook Smith's as Britain's top crisp in the 1960s?

Golden Wonder. The Scottish firm built giant modern factories and won over the north of Britain, and forty years later its bosses were still vowing to win the number-one spot back.

Which US state sued Frito-Lay and other chip makers in 2005 for failing to warn buyers about a frying by-product?

California. Its Proposition 65 demands warnings on anything containing a listed carcinogen, and in a 2008 settlement the chip makers agreed to cut the chemical's level in their products instead.

Which Pennsylvania snack brand began when a 21-year-old bought a tiny chip company in 1946?

Herr's. Jim Herr's sales averaged about $30 a week at first and he worked out of a vacated tobacco shed, yet the business grew to sell more than $100 million a year.

Kettle Brand, a pioneer of thick-cut 'hand-cooked' chips, was founded in which north-western US state?

Oregon. Its founder began by selling roasted nuts from the back of his van, and about a decade later the company carried its thick-cut chips across the Atlantic to Britain.

Which flavour is a distinctively Canadian potato chip variety?

Ketchup. Canada calls them its signature snack, yet nobody is sure who made them first: one journalist's three-month hunt for the inventor ended without an answer.

The 2002 potato chip health scare concerned which chemical formed by frying at high heat?

Acrylamide. Swedish scientists found it in fried potatoes and set off alarm around the world, though Cancer Research UK now files the fear that burnt food causes cancer under myths.

PepsiCo said in 2010 it would make Lay's healthier by redesigning what?

The salt crystals. Its 'designer salt' was shaped and sized so that less sodium goes down with each chip, with the aim of taking a quarter of the salt out of Lay's Classic.

What was the fat substitute in some 1990s fat-free chips, notorious for causing digestive trouble?

Olestra. It passed through the body undigested, taking vitamins with it, and the Wow! chips Frito-Lay built around it in 1998 had to carry a warning about cramps.

Which baked corn snack did critic Tanya Gold insist, in a 2020 review, 'is absolutely not a crisp'?

Monster Munch. Gold's review dug up its first name, The Prime Monster, a pun on the prime minister of 1977 that lasted only a year before the snack was renamed.

Walkers marked striker Jamie Vardy's record scoring run in 2015 with a limited-edition packet punningly named what?

Vardy Salted. He had scored in eleven Premier League games in a row, beating Ruud van Nistelrooy's record of ten, and his unfancied club went on to win the title that season.

Which Japanese company is one of the country's two major chip makers, alongside Koikeya?

Calbee. The name joins 'cal' from calcium and 'bee' from vitamin B1, the nutrients its founder wanted to put into the sweets he made in post-war Hiroshima.

A 2004 British salt survey found that a bag of ready-salted crisps holds less salt than a bowl of which cereal?

Cornflakes. A typical bowl had more than twice a crisp packet's salt, yet tastes less salty because the salt is locked inside the flake instead of dusted on the surface.

Walkers sells its cheese and onion crisps in which colour of packet, the reverse of most British brands?

Blue. Rivals keep blue for their vinegar flavour and put cheese and onion in green, and so many shoppers believe Walkers once swapped the two that the firm has had to deny it.

Which slogan became Lay's best-known line after the 1961 Frito merger?

Betcha can't eat just one. Frito-Lay began using the dare in 1963 and built years of television adverts around people trying, and failing, to stop at a single chip.

Which sci-fi author and mechanical engineer helped build the machine that cooks Pringles?

Gene Wolfe. Long before The Book of the New Sun made his name he was a food-industry engineer, and worked out how to fry the moulded potato shapes before they dropped onto the belt to be canned.

Pringles' maker told a British court in 2008 they were not crisps, hoping to escape what?

Value added tax. The firm said a Pringle is only 42% potato, with a shape 'not found in nature', and it won, until the Court of Appeal ruled a year later that the tax was due after all.

Walkers fills its crisp bags with which gas instead of air to keep them fresh?

Nitrogen. Oxygen would turn the oil rancid, whereas nitrogen leaves the crisps alone and cushions them from crushing; Walkers took it up in the 1990s along with foil bags.

Which Pennsylvania snack maker began in 1921 in the tiny home kitchen of a couple named William and Salie?

Utz. Salie cooked the chips and William delivered them to local grocers, and the firm stayed so low-key that in 2015 a word of praise from Warren Buffett set off takeover rumours.

What did PepsiCo India do weeks after suing farmers over its Lay's potato?

Dropped the lawsuits. In 2019 it had sought heavy damages from farmers in Gujarat over a variety called FC5, and backed down after protests by farm unions and talks with the government.

Which first name did Pringles adopt for its moustachioed mascot after a Wikipedia prank had invented it?

Julius. Two students slipped the made-up name Julius Pringles into the online encyclopedia in 2006, it spread unchallenged for years, and in 2013 the brand's owner trademarked it and made it real.