by Kevin Burton
Without this great big clue you would never guess this, or even think of it. With the clue you surely won’t miss.
Guess where and how the ashes of the late Fredrick Baur, inventor of Pringles, are buried?
Yep, in a Pringles can.
Ah but ain’t that America?
“When Fredric Baur requested that his children bury part of his cremated remains in a Pringles can, his kids initially laughed it off,” wrote Hannah Doolin on delish.com. “But when it came time to head to the funeral home, they stopped at Walgreens to pick up a container to honor their father’s accomplishments.”
“Baur’s son Larry told Time, ‘My siblings and I briefly debated what flavor to use. But I said, , look, we need to use the original.’”
We’re talking Pringles today not burial plots in case you were wondering.
I thought Pringles were brand new when I encountered them as a child in the early 1970s. Wikipedia says they were invented in 1968, so they were not brand new in the 70s, even though they were marketed as “Pringles new-fangled potato chips.”
New-fangled, not new. The new-fangled part of course, was the can. All other chips came in a bag. Pringles were a tidy, stackable treat. Here’s how they came to be according to Wikipedia.
“In 1956, Procter & Gamble assigned a task to chemist Fredric J. Baur (1918–2008): to develop a new kind of potato chip to address consumer complaints about broken, greasy, and stale chips, as well as air in the bags. Baur spent two years developing saddle-shaped chips from fried dough, and selected a tubular can as the chips’ container. The saddle-shape of Pringles chips is mathematically known as a hyperbolic paraboloid. However, Baur could not figure out how to make the chips palatable, and was pulled off the task to work on another brand.
“In the mid-1960s another P&G researcher, Alexander Liepa of Montgomery, Ohio, restarted Baur’s work and succeeded in improving the taste. Although Baur designed the shape of the Pringles chip, Liepa’s name is on the patent. Gene Wolfe, a mechanical engineer and author known for science fiction and fantasy novels, helped develop the machine that cooks them.
“P&G began selling Pringles in Indiana in 1968. By 1975, they were available across most of the US, and by 1991 were distributed internationally.
“You may remember how old-school Pringles commercials bashed Lay’s and other potato chip brands for being greasy and stale. Plus, there was the problem of all those sad chip crumbs at the bottom of the bag after being broken in transit,” Doolin wrote. “Pringles were meant to be a solution too all these ailments—crispy, non-greasy and in perfect form.”
“The cylindrical cans, also invented by Fredric Baur, were created specifically to hold the stackable chips in place and keep them fresh. The original design even had a silver pop-top to keep them airtight, which may be where the slogan “Once you pop, the fun don’t stop!” originated.”
Another marketing slogan was “other potato chips just don’t stack up.”
The Wikipedia page includes a paragraph on nutrition that I don’t include here because for one, Pringles have nothing whatsoever to do with nutrition. Also the paragraph refers to one serving as “about 16 Pringles” which is ridiculous.
One serving of Pringles is 16 chips, only if there are only 16 chips left in the can and all the stores are closed.
Oh, and did I mention, Pringles are not technically, chips.
“The product was originally known as Pringle’s Newfangled Potato Chips, but other snack manufacturers objected, saying Pringles failed to meet the definition of a potato ‘chip’ since they were made from a potato-based dough rather than being sliced from potatoes like ‘real’ potato chips,” according to Wikipedia.
“The US Food and Drug Administration weighed in on the matter, and in 1975 they ruled Pringles could only use the word ‘chip’ in their product name within the phrase: ‘potato chips made from dried potatoes.’” Faced with such a lengthy and unpalatable appellation, Pringles eventually renamed their product potato ‘crisps’, instead of chips.
Pringles are about 42 percent potato, Wikipedia said.
“Thanks to a mesmerizing video, we now know how the stackable chips are made,” Doolin wrote. “A combination of water, potato flakes, and corn starch is mixed together, then rolled into a flat potato sheet under four tons of pressure. Once they’re fried in hot oil and coated with seasoning, they do a backflip off one conveyer belt and onto another, falling into perfect stacks.”
“On May 31, 2012, Kellogg’s acquired Pringles for $2.695 billion as part of a plan to grow its international snacks business. The acquisition of Pringles makes Kellogg the second-largest snack company in the world,” according to Wikipedia.
The Cincinnati Bengals football team was invented in 1968, same year as Pringles. The two are forever linked in my mind because my classmate at the Ohio State School for the Blind, the great Tom Lee, was a fan of the Cleveland Browns.
He called the Bengals, the Pringles, “because they are easily crunched.”
This concludes my report on Pringles. We’re down to crumbs here.
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