Pringles History And Information

The history of Pringles began in 1956, when the company that first produced it, Procter & Gamble, sought to make a chip that did not break and could be uniform in flavor and shape. This was done to address complaints from customers about potato chips commonly breaking in their packaging, as well as concerns about staleness and air inside of potato chip bags. A man named Fred Baur, an organic chemist, was enlisted by Procter & Gamble to create a new type of chip that could solve the aforementioned customer complaints. Fred Baur spent around 2 years engineering saddle-shaped chips from fried dough and invented a new tubular can design to be used with the chips as a storage container. Supercomputers were used to ensure that the chips were able to fit into the tubular aluminum-coated can and aerodynamic enough to keep the chips in place to avoid breakage.

While Baur was able to create the shape and also invent the can for what would become Pringles, he struggled to perfect the taste. Try as he might, he could not get Pringles to taste good enough. Eventually, Baur was given a new assignment for a different product. In the mid-1960s, another researcher for P&G, named Alexander Liepa, from Montgomery, Ohio, restarted the work of Fred Baur and succeeded in improving the chip taste enough to take the product to market. The patent for Pringles posted for the year 1976 lists Alexander Liepa as its inventor, with no mention of Fred Baur. On the December 21, 1976 patent for Pringles, the snack is described as “A potato chip product and process wherein a dough is prepared from dehydrated cooked potatoes and water and subsequently fried.”

Pringles is often thought of like a potato chip, however, technically it may just be referred to by its parent company as “crisps”. When Pringles was new to the market, the product was referred to as "Pringles Newfangled Potato Chips", however, there were objections from other snack producers to the brand using the term potato chip to describe Pringles. The US Food and Drug Administration ruled in 1975 that Pringles could only use the word "chip" in their product name within the following phrase: "potato chips made from dried potatoes". Rather than do this, the company began referring to Pringles as potato "crisps" rather than potato chips. However, this caused issued in the United Kingdom where the term potato crisp is thought to be the same as the American view what is a potato chip.

Pringles was subjected to a 17.5% Value Added Tax due to a United Kingdom VAT and Duties Tribunal decision, a rate used for potato crisps and potato-derived snacks. P&G lawyers successfully contested this decision in London High Court during July 2008. Lawyers for Procter & Gamble argued that Pringles were not truly crisps, despite being labeled "Potato Crisps" on their container. It was argued that Pringles shape is not found in nature and that the potato content was only 42%. The court agreed with P&G and Pringles was exempted from the 17.5% VAT. However, In May 2009, the Court of Appeal reversed the previous decision, subjecting Pringles to the 17.5% VAT at the time. Lord Justice Jacob said that "There is more than enough potato content for it to be a reasonable view that it is made from potato.” Procter & Gamble was reportedly paying the VAT proactively, likely as a precaution so that no back tax was due. As of 2019, the container tubes for the Pringles appears to continue to label the product as “potato crisps”.

The machine used to cook Pringles was developed by Gene Wolfe, a mechanical engineer and an author known for his fantasy and science fiction novels. Wolf stated he did not invent the machine, he developed it, stating it was a German man whose name he had forgotten. Wolf said this man had invented the basic idea of how to make the potato dough, pressing it between two forms, more or less as in a wrap-around. Gene Wolfe was in the engineering development division and was tasked with the cooking portion of the mass production equipment used to make Pringles. Wolf stated that the man in the team responsible for the can filling part of the process nearly went crazy due to being asked to find new ways to accommodate an ever increases production rate. Len Hooper was the man responsible for developing the equipment for the dough making/dough rolling portion of the process of making Pringles.

The origin of the name for Pringles is unclear, with several theories around for how the products name was inspired. One theory for how the name of the brand came to be refers to Mark Pringle, who filed a US Patent 2,286,644 titled "Method and Apparatus for Processing Potatoes" on March 5th, 1937. Mark Pringle's work was cited by Procter & Gamble in their own patent for improving the taste of dehydrated processed potatoes. Another theory suggested that the product’s name was derived when two Procter advertising employees who lived on Pringle Drive in Finneytown (north of Cincinnati, Ohio) took the name from where they lived and thought it paired well with potato. Another myth for the origin of the products name suggested the name was picked randomly from a Cincinnati phone book, again for its pleasing sound.

After over nearly a decade from the start of its development, Pringles potato chips were released to the public in the year 1967. The product started small, being sold in limited regions until it became sold countrywide in the United States by the mid-1970s. Throughout the 1960s and 70’s Pringles did not sell very well, one reason being that the flavor still was not good enough for many. Charles Jarvie, vice president of Procter’s food division in the late 1970s, made a statement to the under-performance of Pringles “When I was there 30 years ago, it was dead”. Pringles did so poorly during its early days that some called for the product to be removed from the Procter & Gamble’s lineup. The product, however, made a strong comeback in the 1980s, when the flavor of Pringles was altered and a new advertising campaign called “Fever for the Flavor of Pringles” took effect.

Pringles slowly but surely clawed its way into becoming the largest brand for Procter & Gamble that the company owned, taking in more than 1 billion dollars in revenue by the late 1990s. In July 1991 Pringles crisps were introduced in Great Britain, and by 2011 Pringles was sold in more than 140 countries and was one of the most popular snack brands in the world, accounting for 2.2% of the market share globally.

On Tuesday, April 5th, 2011, Procter & Gamble announced it would be selling the Pringles brand to Diamond Foods, a California originating food company and now a brand. The deal was to be for $2.35 billion, which would include $1.5 billion of Diamond stock and would have tripled the size Diamond Foods snack business. However, the deal was canceled in February 2012 after a long delay due to issues over Diamond Foods accounts.

Kellogg's announced on Wednesday, February 15, 2012, that it would be buying the Pringles brand from P&G for $2.695 billion. The deal was pieced together in just a matter of days after it P&G’s deal with Diamond Foods fell apart. The Kellogg company bought Pringles to expand its snack business, adding the brand to others it owns such as Cheez-It and Keebler. The acquisition roughly tripped Kellogg's snack business. The deal was finalized on May 31, 2012, making the Kellogg company the second-largest snack company in the world at the time.

The saddle-like shape of Pringles is described as a hyperbolic paraboloid. It is a doubly ruled surface: it contains two families of mutually skew lines. As of 2019, Pringles is produced in factories located in Jackson, Tennessee; Mechelen, Belgium; Johor, Malaysia; Kutno, Poland; and Fujian, China. The Pringles mascot is often depicted as a man’s face on the container for the product. The mascots face has a prominent mustache and the mascots name is Julius Pringle. Over the years many flavors of Pringles was introduced, including Grilled Shrimp flavor, Milk Chocolate, and Cheddar Cheese flavor.