Potato chips as we know them trace back to the mid-1800s in the United States, though recipes for thin-fried potato slices existed decades earlier in Europe. The famous origin story centers on a chef in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1853, but the full picture is more complicated and more interesting than a single angry cook and a fussy customer.
The Saratoga Springs Legend
The most widely told origin story stars George Crum, a chef of African American and Native American descent working at Moon Lake Lodge, an upscale resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. In the summer of 1853, a guest reportedly sent back an order of French-fried potatoes, complaining they were sliced too thick. Crum, irritated, sliced a new batch paper-thin, fried them until they were brown and crunchy, and sent them out. Instead of the insult Crum may have intended, the guest loved them. Other diners started requesting the same dish, and “Saratoga Chips” became one of the lodge’s signature offerings.
Crum leaned into his creation. In 1860 he opened his own restaurant, Crumbs House, near Saratoga Lake, where a basket of potato chips sat on every table. The clientele was wealthy: William Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Jay Gould all reportedly dined there. But Crum never patented the chip or tried to sell it beyond his restaurant. He closed the place in 1890 and died in 1914 at the age of 90, having watched other entrepreneurs turn his regional specialty into a much bigger business.
Recipes That Came Before Crum
The Saratoga story is appealing, but it has a significant hole: recipes for essentially the same thing were already in print decades earlier. In 1817, the English physician and cookbook author William Kitchiner published “The Cook’s Oracle,” which included a recipe for “Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings.” The instructions are remarkably familiar: peel large potatoes, slice them about a quarter-inch thick (or peel them in thin shavings like a lemon rind), dry them in a cloth, fry them in lard until crisp, drain them on a sieve, and sprinkle with a little salt. That is, for all practical purposes, a potato chip recipe from 36 years before Crum’s famous incident.
This doesn’t mean Crum’s story is fiction. He may well have independently created and popularized thin-fried potato slices at Saratoga Springs. But the idea of frying potatoes in thin, crispy pieces was already circulating in European kitchens, which makes the chip less a single invention and more something that emerged in parallel on both sides of the Atlantic.
How Chips Crossed the Atlantic to Britain
While Saratoga Chips were gaining popularity in American resorts, Britain had its own relationship with fried potatoes developing on a separate timeline. In the early 1900s, Brits were still mostly buying baked potatoes whole from street vendors. That changed around 1909, when a London merchant visited Paris and discovered “perles de Paris,” thin potato wafers fried in oil. He brought the French vendor back to London, and within a decade factories across England were producing their own versions. The British called them “crisps” rather than “chips,” since “chips” in the UK already meant what Americans call French fries. That linguistic split persists today and remains one of the most reliable sources of transatlantic confusion.
From Barrels to Bags
For the first several decades of their commercial life, potato chips were sold from bulk barrels or large tins in stores and restaurants. They went stale quickly and broke easily, which limited how far they could travel and how long they could sit on a shelf. The person who solved this problem was Laura Scudder, a California businesswoman who in 1926 began having her employees iron sheets of wax paper into sealed pouches and fill them with chips. It was a simple idea with enormous consequences. Sealed bags kept chips fresh, protected them from breaking, and made it possible to sell them as individual packaged products in stores rather than scooping them from open containers. Modern chip packaging is a direct descendant of Scudder’s wax paper pouches.
Commercialization picked up quickly after that. One of the earliest dedicated chip companies in the U.S. was founded by Daniel Mikesell in Dayton, Ohio, in 1910, though it initially sold dried beef and sausage before pivoting to potato chips around 1925. By the 1930s, regional chip companies were popping up across the country, and the snack food industry was taking shape.
Corn Chips and Tortilla Chips
Potato chips aren’t the only chips with a good origin story. In 1932, a Texan named Charles Elmer Doolin walked into a small café in San Antonio, ordered a sandwich and a bag of corn chips, and learned that the man making them wanted to sell the business and move back to Mexico. Doolin bought the recipe, 39 retail accounts, and the only piece of equipment (a modified potato ricer) for $100. That purchase became Fritos, which eventually merged with Lay’s to form Frito-Lay, one of the largest snack companies in the world.
Tortilla chips followed a different path. In the late 1940s, Rebecca Webb Carranza ran the El Zarape Tortilla Factory in Los Angeles with her husband. Their automated tortilla machine produced plenty of “bent” or misshapen tortillas that had to be discarded. For a family party, Carranza cut some of the rejects into triangles and fried them. They were a hit. She started selling them for a dime a bag at her Mexican delicatessen, and the tortilla chip industry grew from there.
When Chips Got Flavor
For roughly a century, potato chips came in one flavor: salted. That changed in 1954 when Joe “Spud” Murphy, founder of the Irish company Tayto, developed a technique for adding seasoning during the manufacturing process. His first flavored variety was Cheese and Onion, which remains one of the most popular crisp flavors in the UK and Ireland. The innovation opened the door to the enormous range of chip flavors available today, from barbecue and sour cream to the more adventurous options found in markets around the world.
The chip’s journey from an 1817 English cookbook recipe to a global snack worth tens of billions of dollars annually involved no single inventor and no single moment. It was a series of small innovations: slicing thinner, frying crispier, sealing bags, adding seasoning. Crum may or may not have been motivated by spite in 1853, but the snack he helped popularize turned out to be one of the most durable food inventions in modern history.