The Engineering Behind Stackable Chips

Have you ever opened a bag of potato chips eagerly anticipating a crisp snack, only to find a pile of shattered crumbs submerged in a pocket of air? For decades, this frustrating experience was an accepted reality for snack lovers. Traditional potato chips were inherently fragile. Because they were made from thin slices of raw potatoes, their irregular shapes made tight packaging impossible. During shipping, they bounced around inside flexible plastic bags, resulting in greasy fingers, broken chips, and product that quickly went stale when exposed to oxygen. In the mid-1950s, executives at Procter & Gamble set out to eliminate this persistent problem once and for all.

To revolutionize the snack industry, the company enlisted Dr. Fredric Baur, an organic chemist and food storage specialist. Baur approached the assignment not merely as a culinary challenge, but as a complex structural engineering puzzle. He quickly recognized that natural potato slices could never yield consistent results because potatoes vary naturally in size, moisture content, and shape. Instead, Baur developed an entirely new formula: he created a moldable dough using ground dehydrated potato flakes, cornstarch, water, and seasonings. This uniform dough could be rolled into thin sheets and stamped into identical shapes, laying the foundation for a completely re-engineered snack.