Why would Lay’s wait until now to copy Pringles and have “formed, not sliced” chips in a can?
Didn’t they have decades to do this?
I’ve seen lots of “constituted” snacks in their line up over the years, most in the chip category but some in snack crackers.
What took them so long to come around? Pride, do you suppose?
But they must have realized they could cut Pringles’ sales in half the first day they announced, even if they followed anti-trust rules and didn’t low-ball the price.
Actually, if you think back, there were many potato ‘crisp’ products by Frito-Lay, but none quite like the Pringles. I’d guess that some key patent expired.
I took a quick glance through the patent database for (potato and chip) and (potato and snack). Very enlightening, but the search engine only went back to 1976. Also looking at the ‘referenced patents’ in patents found by the “Abstracts only” engine, I found more that the search engine missed. Maybe the Full Text engine would have done a better job – but I only do this in spare moments
I’m mean I’m not a total loon.
Still, the patents I found were intriguing, and brough back many snack memories (and made me ravenous - I skipped lunch) The Patent database is a much under appreciated tool.
Actually, if I recall correctly (they were very mysterious when they first came out), they had a very specific process to pelletize the potatoes, dehydrate them and reconstitute them into a paste that retained some texture.
The process you described would lead to fried mashed potatoes (or my many childhood efforts to make latkes from mashed potato mix) You would not believe how many different, bizarre, and messy ways those experiments failed.