Who Invented Crisps?

The great snack obsession of the British is, after all, American.

It is attributed to a fed up mixed race (African and native American origins) chef named George Crum.  He was working in an New York State restaurant (in Saratoga Springs)  and got fed up with a client who kept sending back fried potatoes, complaining that they were "soggy".  So he sliced them so thin that they couldn't be eaten with a fork.... and the moaning customer loved 'em.

They soon became a regular on the menu and even today in the USA you can buy "Saratoga chips" (since the Americans call crisps "chips").  You could buy ready-to-eat crisps in barrels or cereal box-sized packets (ones at the bottom were quite soggy).

It wasn't until the late 1920s and early 1930s that small portions of crisps were first made and sold in wax paper bags in the USA.  British manufacturers didn't really get going with the idea until after WWII, when Golden Wonder and Walkers began mass production of snack sized sealed fresh crisps.

Flavoured crisps in the UK weren't commercially available until 1962 (Golden Wonders).