…What choices? All I see are different types of pringles, which suck?

Where are the Utz? The Middlesworth, The Hartley’s Potato Chip Co? The Martin’s? The Snyder’s of Hanover? The Snyder’s of Berlin? The Good’s Red or Blue Potato chips? The Herr’s? The Dieffenbachs Potato Chips? Hell those are just the brands I get get when I walk into a gas station.

In the early 1960s two companies, the Proctor and Gamble company of Cincinnati, OH,(Pringles) and General Mills of Minneapolis, MN (Chipos) decided to take the technology for producing soap and apply it to potato chips, or something like them. Create a slurry, press it, bake it, wrap it and market it; the processes are remarkably similar for bars of soap and Pringles, the name Proctor and Gamble chose for the new product. The snack food industry was appalled and frightened by this threat to market a standard product nationally, although the large national manufacturers had been doing that for many years, and they fought the name of the product vigorously through court actions and lobbying. Their goal was to deny these companies use of the words “potato chip.” They eventually failed and the official name for this product is “potato chips made from dried potatoes” with the “made from dried potatoes” in type at least one-half the size of the largest type in “potato chips.” This summer, while consuming a canister, I noticed that Pringles are now called “potato crisps.” A Lexis/Nexis search produced no legal prodding from anyone to change the name and I have yet to send a letter to the Proctor and Gamble Company to find out why. It appears that General Mills no longer makes Chipos.
This controversy drew the ire of political commentator Mark Russell who, on public television in late 1975, forever endeared himself to the snack food industry and lovers of regional culture generally by declaiming:

“My fellow Americans, I believe that the quality of life in America today is deteriorating because of the presence in our homes of canned potato chips. May I say that the Pringles controversy is an ever-growing menace. When we were children, were potato chips packed in an air-tight can? No, potato chips were meant to be free – BORN FREE – bouncing around in a little bag…All Pringles are exactly the same. You can buy one in Washington, D.C. and then go out to San Francisco and buy another that is exactly the same. Now, if that isn’t Communism, I don’t know what is.” (Quoted in Snack Food Association 1987, 286).