Potato chips

Potato chips or crisps are a snack food made from potatoes cut into very thin slices, deep fried or baked until crisp, and then served. Commercial varieties are packaged for sale, usually in bags. The simplest chips are simply cooked and salted, but a wide variety of seasonings (mostly made using MSG and herbs or spices) are used to produce various 'seasoned' chips. Potato chips are an important part of the snack food market in English-speaking countries.

Seasoned chips

The potato chip or crisp remained unseasoned, which limited its appeal, until an innovation by the owner of an Irish crisp company called Tayto, who developed a technology to add seasoning in the 1950s. Though he had a small company, consisting almost entirely of his immediate family who prepared the chips, the owner had long proved himself an innovator. After some trial and error, he produced the world's first seasoned potato chips, "Cheese and Onion" and "Salt 'n' Vinegar".

Related Topics:
Tayto - Trial and error - "Salt 'n' Vinegar"

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Chips seasoned with salt had been sold previously, but the salt was supplied in a sealed packet inside the chip bag, to be added when required.

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His innovation became an overnight sensation in the food industry, with the heads of some of the biggest potato chip companies in the United States heading to the small Tayto company to examine the product and to negotiate the rights to use the new technology. When eventually the Tayto company was sold, it made the owner and the small family group who had changed the face of potato chip manufacture very wealthy. Companies worldwide sought to buy the rights to Tayto's technique.

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That Tayto Crisps innovation changed the whole nature of the potato chip. Later potato chip manufacturers added natural and artificial seasonings to potato chips, with varying degrees of success. A product that had had a large appeal to a limited market on the basis of one seasoning now had a degree of market penetration through vast numbers of seasonings that would have astonished George Crum. The most popular forms of seasoned potato chips include "sour cream and onion," "barbecue," and cheese-seasoned chips. Various other seasonings of potato chips are sold in different locales, including the original "salt and vinegar," produced by Tayto, which remains by far Ireland's biggest manufacturer of crisps.

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Some Potato Chip manufacturers, such as Lay's, produce flavors based on regional interest. Particularly notable in North America are the wide varieties available in parts of Canada, where flavors include "dill pickle", "ketchup" and even "poutine". On occasion these special flavors will be released for a limited time in the United States.

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