Potato Chip Trivia
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96 free Potato Chip trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free Potato chip trivia questions with answers. Potato chip trivia usually begins and ends with George Crum and the fussy customer in Saratoga Springs, a story historians have long since debunked. This quiz starts there and keeps going: the 1817 English cookbook with the first recipe, the London firm that put a twist of salt in the bag, the Irishman who invented cheese and onion in 1954, the California nurse who ironed wax-paper bags at home, and the chemist who was buried in a Pringles can. The brand round covers Lay's and Frito-Lay, Pringles and its hyperbolic-paraboloid shape, Walkers and its Leicester factory, Tayto, Smith's, Golden Wonder, Cape Cod, Utz, Herr's, Zapp's and Kettle, plus the chips-versus-crisps naming mess across the English-speaking world, kettle-cooked versus continuous frying, and the acrylamide scare. Whether you call them chips or crisps, there is a question here you will get wrong. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the snack and its makers, and each question carries its source. Difficulty ranges from things printed on the bag to details from company histories.
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The earliest known potato chip recipe was printed in 1817 in a bestselling cookbook from which country?
England
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.
Q 02Legend credits the potato chip to a cook at Moon's Lake House in which New York resort town?
Saratoga Springs
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.
Q 03A 1973 advertising campaign added which tycoon to the potato chip legend as the fussy diner?
Cornelius Vanderbilt
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.
Q 04Which cook does legend credit with inventing the potato chip in 1853 to spite a customer who sent back his fries?
George Crum
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.
Q 05Before sealed bags arrived in the 1920s, grocers usually sold potato chips loose from glass cases or what?
Barrels
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.
Q 06In the 1920s, Frank Smith sold his crisps around London in greaseproof bags with what tucked inside?
A twist of salt
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.
Q 07Which Irish company is widely credited with the world's first flavoured crisp, cheese and onion, in the 1950s?
Tayto
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.
Q 08Smith's answered its rivals' cheese and onion with which flavour, launched nationally in 1967?
Salt and vinegar
Salt and vinegar. Smith's tried the flavour out first through Tudor, its subsidiary on Tyneside, before taking it nationwide.
Q 09Which flavour, hailed in the trade press in 1955, was among the first seasoned potato chips sold in the United States?
Barbecue
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.
Q 10In the 1920s, Laura Scudder's workers took home sheets of what to iron into sealed potato chip bags?
Wax paper
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.
Q 11Kettle-cooked potato chips get their hard crunch from being fried how?
In small batches
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.
Q 12Which brand, started in 1980 by a man who sold his auto-parts business, popularised kettle-cooked chips in the US?
Cape Cod
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.
Q 13In Britain and Ireland, what does the word 'chips' refer to?
French fries
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.
Q 21In Mexico, PepsiCo sells its Lay's potato chips under which long-established local brand name?
Sabritas
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.
Q 22Which Lay's sub-brand, sold in a tall canister, was launched to compete with Pringles?
Lay's Stax
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.
Q 23Walkers was founded in the 1940s in which English city, home to the world's largest crisp plant?
Leicester
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.
Q 14Which cereal maker bought Pringles in 2012 for about $2.7 billion?
Kellogg's
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.
Q 15Which company launched Pringles in 1968?
Procter & Gamble
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.
Q 16The saddle shape of a Pringle is known mathematically as what?
A hyperbolic paraboloid
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.
Q 17What last wish did Pringles can designer Fredric Baur leave his family?
Burial in one of his cans
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.
Q 18One theory says Pringles were named after what?
A street in suburban Cincinnati
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.
Q 19Herman Lay started out in 1932 selling potato chips from what?
His Ford Model A
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.
Q 20Which Wizard of Oz star was the face of Lay's potato chip adverts in the 1960s?
Bert Lahr
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.
Q 24What trade was the Walker family in before it founded Walkers crisps?
Butchery
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.
Q 25Which footballer did Walkers sign in 1994 to front its crisp adverts?
Gary Lineker
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.
Q 26One of Ireland's best-known crisp brands became such a fixture that in 2010 its owner opened what?
A theme park
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.
Q 27Which brand overtook Smith's as Britain's top crisp in the 1960s?
Golden Wonder
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.
Q 28Which US state sued Frito-Lay and other chip makers in 2005 for failing to warn buyers about a frying by-product?
California
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.
Q 29Which Pennsylvania snack brand began when a 21-year-old bought a tiny chip company in 1946?
Herr's
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.
Q 30Kettle Brand, a pioneer of thick-cut 'hand-cooked' chips, was founded in which north-western US state?
Oregon
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.