Food Fact Friday: Potato Chips

February is National Snack Food Month. When I was doing some research, I found out one of the first commercial snack foods in the United States was the potato chip.


In the summer of 1853, George Crum was employed as a chef at an elegant resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. One dinner guest found Crum's French fries too thick for his liking and rejected the order. Crum decided to upset the guest by producing fries too thin and crispy, that you couldn't eat them with a fork. The plan backfired. The guest was ecstatic over the browned, paper-thin potatoes, and other diners began requesting Crum's potato chips. Crum eventually started his own restaurant in which every table got a basket of chip.

The idea of making them as a food item for sale in grocery stores came was brought up by William Tappendon of Cleveland, OH, in 1895. He began making chips in his kitchen and delivering to neighborhood stores but later converted a barn in the rear of his house into "one of the first potato chip factories" in the country.

At that time, potatoes were tediously peeled and sliced by hand. It was the invention of the mechanical potato peeler in the 1920s that paved the way for potato chips to soar from a small specialty item to a top-selling snack food. They were mostly only sold in the Northeastern states for the next couple of decades.


In 1932, Herman Lay founded Lay's in Nashville, Tenn., which distributed potato chips from a factory in Atlanta, Ga. Herman Lay, a traveling salesman in the South, helped popularize the food from Atlanta to Tennessee. Lay peddled potato chips to Southern grocers out of the trunk of his car. Lay's potato chips eventually became the first successfully marketed national brand.

There are now tons of varieties of potato chips, from Barbecue to Shrimp (yes, they do exist). My favorite flavor is Salt & Vinegar. They are the most popular snack in the U.S. Retail sales of potato chips in the U.S. are over $6 billion a year.