Early Packaging Including Boxes
The best place to start is obviously, the beginning. I therefore will focus on the first known companies and their early packaging.
2009
In an article and interview with the founders of the Saratoga Specialties Co., Danny Jameson and Paul Tator revealed the background to their re-launch of Saratoga Potato Chips.
“Jameson and Tator came up with the idea for their company, Saratoga Specialties Co., in January of this year, after seeing a replica of the original Moon Brand box at the Saratoga Springs History Museum.”
The complete interview is here:
LINK
2013
In July 2013, The Saratoga Chips Company was purchased Jim Schneider and Joe Boff.
Schneider explained the company’s switch from boxes to bags.
“First the box had to go, says Schneider, as despite its retro appeal (the Jamesons copied the design from the original box of Moon’s Lake House Saratoga Chips they found in a museum), the format was just too nice: “The American consumer doesn’t buy Chips in a box.”
The complete interview and a further article can be found here:
LINK 1
LINK 2
To further research the early packaging, I visited the Saratoga Springs History Museum’s website:
Saratoga Springs History Museum
Closely related to the museum is a collector of Chips and Crisps related artefacts and packaging, Alan Richer, who provided me with the following photograph.
2009
In an article and interview with the founders of the Saratoga Specialties Co., Danny Jameson and Paul Tator revealed the background to their re-launch of Saratoga Potato Chips.
“Jameson and Tator came up with the idea for their company, Saratoga Specialties Co., in January of this year, after seeing a replica of the original Moon Brand box at the Saratoga Springs History Museum.”
The complete interview is here:
LINK
2013
In July 2013, The Saratoga Chips Company was purchased Jim Schneider and Joe Boff.
Schneider explained the company’s switch from boxes to bags.
“First the box had to go, says Schneider, as despite its retro appeal (the Jamesons copied the design from the original box of Moon’s Lake House Saratoga Chips they found in a museum), the format was just too nice: “The American consumer doesn’t buy Chips in a box.”
The complete interview and a further article can be found here:
LINK 1
LINK 2
To further research the early packaging, I visited the Saratoga Springs History Museum’s website:
Saratoga Springs History Museum
Closely related to the museum is a collector of Chips and Crisps related artefacts and packaging, Alan Richer, who provided me with the following photograph.
|
The Saratoga Chips box is currently located at the Saratoga County Historical Society in Ballston Spa, New York.
The County Historian opened the box and it contains tan coloured tissue type paper with either printed or stamped flowers at the edges. It is not clear whether the paper is original to the box, but it does contain some stains that could either be grease or possibly mould. The box was discovered in 1977 when a Victorian mansion was undergoing some renovations. It was found between two walls. Information on the box includes this detail: “January 29th, 1884-1892” which is when the Potato Chips were being produced. |
The next stage in the timeline can be authenticated by the following link:
LINK
“Potato chips first became available in grocery stores in 1895. That was the year that William Tappenden began delivering Potato Chips to stores in his Cleveland, Ohio, neighbourhood. He used a horse-drawn wagon to deliver the Potato Chip that he started making on his kitchen stove. As orders increased, Tappenden converted his barn into one of the first potato chip factories.”
These are the dates of the earliest recorded Potato Chips companies in the USA:
1910 George Dentler, Houston, Texas.
1913 Dan Dee Pretzel and Potato Chip Company, Cleveland, Ohio.
1918 Num Num, Cleveland, Ohio
1919 Blue Bell - Illinois
1921 Wise Delicatessen Company, Berwick, Pennsylvania
1921 Utz - Hanover, Pennsylvania. started as the Hanover Home Brand Potato Chips
1921 Magic Food Co, later Golden Flake*, Birmingham, Alabama.
1924 Moore's, Bristol, Virginia.
1926 Scudder's - Monterey Park, California
1930 Better Made - Detroit, Michigan
1932 Lay's - founded by Herman Lay of Nashville, Tennessee
In the book: Crunch, A History of The Great American Potato Chip, by Dirk Burhaus, chapter 3 is entitled "Bursting the Seams."
It is here that we find the most detailed discussion on packaging during their earliest days of manufacturing. Although physical evidence is limited what we do know suggests several of the above companies would have utilised boxes as a method of packaging. Not least from the evidence of other foodstuffs and their packaging from the same period.
These therefore, are the excerpts that are most pertinent to our research.
“We know that immediately after its invention at Moon’s Lake House, “Saratoga Chips” were served there nightly in baskets or “paper cornucopias” at tables, a custom that spread to the other Saratoga Hotel restaurants, and then likely spread farther into surrounding New York State, Pennsylvania, and New England.
“In a 1970s interview an executive of a Chip company suggested that a caterer named Fleeper, who supplied box lunches to excursion boat passengers between Boston and Nahant, was the first to sell Potato Chips outside of Saratoga Springs.”
It is suggested that these boxed lunches included a box for the Potato Chips.
If we return to the accepted industry timeline, the very earliest independent companies that sold Potato Chips, goes something like this:
1908 Leominster Potato Chip Co., Leominster, MA (later changed the name to Tri-Sum) and is still in existence.
1910 Mikesell's Potato Chips, Dayton, Ohio. This company is the oldest still manufacturing Potato Chips or Crisps in the world that still trades under its original name.
This leads to the next excerpt in the book:
“Each summer, the family would pack up and set off for the fairs,” wrote Leslie C. Mapp in his account of Mikesells’s Potato Chips, Dayton, Ohio.
“They lived in a tent and sold from a glass case filled with Potato Chips, with the children soon developing an unerring knack of knowing how large a scoopful would fill a five cent bag.”
More accurate evidence for the packaging of Potato Chips during these early days comes from another interview within this chapter in an account by Conn’s Chips, another of the early Chips companies, which details an accurate description of the packaging up until the late 1920s.
“Mrs. Conn made the Chips in that washing machine type cooker.
“I can see her now with the basket under her arm, with the little bags of Chips in wax paper bags, no printing on ‘em. Used two clips of the stapler.
“Of course, in the early days they used bags with a little clip, and that all right, except when the muggy weather came, you know what happened... You made ‘em in the morning and they were almost stale by noon.”
William Backer also confirmed the process by Backer’s in those early days, “The way you’d close ‘em was with a paper clip. You had your stack of bags over here.
“The first thing you’d do was separate them; then you’d scoop ‘em up with a metal scoop, and you’d have a scale – and you’d get to where you didn’t need to weigh them – but you still weighed them on the balance. And then you’d set it in the slot.
“Later on it got to where you used a stapler.”
The next milestone in Potato Chip distribution came in 1926. To which we return to the SFA article above.
“Up until this time, retailers dispensed Potato Chips in bulk from cracker barrels or glass display cases. The chips were then given to customers in paper sacks.
“Laura Scudder, working in her Monterey Park, California, based family Chip business, had a new idea. At night, women employees in the company took home sheets of waxed paper and hand-ironed them into bags. The next day, the workers hand-packed Chips into the bags and sealed the tops with a warm iron. The bags of Chips were then delivered to retailers where they could be purchased by customers.”
Laura Scudders history can be found here:
Laura Scudders
“If Laura Scudder took the first steps to improve Chip packaging, others took her concept one step further. “At about the same time that Scudder discovered wax paper's advantages, engineers elsewhere were experimenting with cellophane.
“The Dixie Wax Paper Company finally made a true sealed bag, the Fresheen bag, using glassine. “Apparently, piercing the waxy coating and hard surface of glassine to create the seal was no easy task, but it revolutionized the industry, taking Chips off the counter and allowing them to be shipped more than twenty miles from the factory.
This is confirmed, again by the book: Crunch, A History of The Great American Potato Chip
“Opaque printing inks could now be used with the new materials. With nicely printed labels on good packages, the public learned to associate an image or logo with a certain type of Chip. John Morgan, a former executive at Dixico, said that by 1934, when Chip companies got the new Fresheen bags, they "just burst out of their seams.”
What we learn from the above is that the industry moved on very quickly, utilising many of the same sales and marketing methodology. Tried and trusted practices developed and improved quickly, as is often the case with small businesses that do not carry the burden of large corporation timescales.
LINK
“Potato chips first became available in grocery stores in 1895. That was the year that William Tappenden began delivering Potato Chips to stores in his Cleveland, Ohio, neighbourhood. He used a horse-drawn wagon to deliver the Potato Chip that he started making on his kitchen stove. As orders increased, Tappenden converted his barn into one of the first potato chip factories.”
These are the dates of the earliest recorded Potato Chips companies in the USA:
1910 George Dentler, Houston, Texas.
1913 Dan Dee Pretzel and Potato Chip Company, Cleveland, Ohio.
1918 Num Num, Cleveland, Ohio
1919 Blue Bell - Illinois
1921 Wise Delicatessen Company, Berwick, Pennsylvania
1921 Utz - Hanover, Pennsylvania. started as the Hanover Home Brand Potato Chips
1921 Magic Food Co, later Golden Flake*, Birmingham, Alabama.
1924 Moore's, Bristol, Virginia.
1926 Scudder's - Monterey Park, California
1930 Better Made - Detroit, Michigan
1932 Lay's - founded by Herman Lay of Nashville, Tennessee
In the book: Crunch, A History of The Great American Potato Chip, by Dirk Burhaus, chapter 3 is entitled "Bursting the Seams."
It is here that we find the most detailed discussion on packaging during their earliest days of manufacturing. Although physical evidence is limited what we do know suggests several of the above companies would have utilised boxes as a method of packaging. Not least from the evidence of other foodstuffs and their packaging from the same period.
These therefore, are the excerpts that are most pertinent to our research.
“We know that immediately after its invention at Moon’s Lake House, “Saratoga Chips” were served there nightly in baskets or “paper cornucopias” at tables, a custom that spread to the other Saratoga Hotel restaurants, and then likely spread farther into surrounding New York State, Pennsylvania, and New England.
“In a 1970s interview an executive of a Chip company suggested that a caterer named Fleeper, who supplied box lunches to excursion boat passengers between Boston and Nahant, was the first to sell Potato Chips outside of Saratoga Springs.”
It is suggested that these boxed lunches included a box for the Potato Chips.
If we return to the accepted industry timeline, the very earliest independent companies that sold Potato Chips, goes something like this:
1908 Leominster Potato Chip Co., Leominster, MA (later changed the name to Tri-Sum) and is still in existence.
1910 Mikesell's Potato Chips, Dayton, Ohio. This company is the oldest still manufacturing Potato Chips or Crisps in the world that still trades under its original name.
This leads to the next excerpt in the book:
“Each summer, the family would pack up and set off for the fairs,” wrote Leslie C. Mapp in his account of Mikesells’s Potato Chips, Dayton, Ohio.
“They lived in a tent and sold from a glass case filled with Potato Chips, with the children soon developing an unerring knack of knowing how large a scoopful would fill a five cent bag.”
More accurate evidence for the packaging of Potato Chips during these early days comes from another interview within this chapter in an account by Conn’s Chips, another of the early Chips companies, which details an accurate description of the packaging up until the late 1920s.
“Mrs. Conn made the Chips in that washing machine type cooker.
“I can see her now with the basket under her arm, with the little bags of Chips in wax paper bags, no printing on ‘em. Used two clips of the stapler.
“Of course, in the early days they used bags with a little clip, and that all right, except when the muggy weather came, you know what happened... You made ‘em in the morning and they were almost stale by noon.”
William Backer also confirmed the process by Backer’s in those early days, “The way you’d close ‘em was with a paper clip. You had your stack of bags over here.
“The first thing you’d do was separate them; then you’d scoop ‘em up with a metal scoop, and you’d have a scale – and you’d get to where you didn’t need to weigh them – but you still weighed them on the balance. And then you’d set it in the slot.
“Later on it got to where you used a stapler.”
The next milestone in Potato Chip distribution came in 1926. To which we return to the SFA article above.
“Up until this time, retailers dispensed Potato Chips in bulk from cracker barrels or glass display cases. The chips were then given to customers in paper sacks.
“Laura Scudder, working in her Monterey Park, California, based family Chip business, had a new idea. At night, women employees in the company took home sheets of waxed paper and hand-ironed them into bags. The next day, the workers hand-packed Chips into the bags and sealed the tops with a warm iron. The bags of Chips were then delivered to retailers where they could be purchased by customers.”
Laura Scudders history can be found here:
Laura Scudders
“If Laura Scudder took the first steps to improve Chip packaging, others took her concept one step further. “At about the same time that Scudder discovered wax paper's advantages, engineers elsewhere were experimenting with cellophane.
“The Dixie Wax Paper Company finally made a true sealed bag, the Fresheen bag, using glassine. “Apparently, piercing the waxy coating and hard surface of glassine to create the seal was no easy task, but it revolutionized the industry, taking Chips off the counter and allowing them to be shipped more than twenty miles from the factory.
This is confirmed, again by the book: Crunch, A History of The Great American Potato Chip
“Opaque printing inks could now be used with the new materials. With nicely printed labels on good packages, the public learned to associate an image or logo with a certain type of Chip. John Morgan, a former executive at Dixico, said that by 1934, when Chip companies got the new Fresheen bags, they "just burst out of their seams.”
What we learn from the above is that the industry moved on very quickly, utilising many of the same sales and marketing methodology. Tried and trusted practices developed and improved quickly, as is often the case with small businesses that do not carry the burden of large corporation timescales.
