The First Kettle Chip Brand Wasn't The Popular Cape Cod One

There's no shortage of options in the snack aisle when you're on the hunt for goodies. There are bags of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies, packages of Planters salted peanuts, and the rest of the most popular snacks in America, all ripe for the picking. There's also just about every potato chip you can think of, from salt and vinegar to barbecue, from wavy-style to kettle chip. And while bags of Cape Cod kettle-cooked potato chips might be positioned front and center, the well-known brand wasn't the first to make those slim, crunchy chips that everyone knows so well.

The first kettle chips were invented by a cook named George Crum, who originally went by George Speck, at a restaurant called Moon's Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York. The chip reportedly entered circulation at Moon's Lake House in 1853, though Crum eventually opened his own restaurant in 1860, where he served the chips with every meal. The chips were dubbed "Saratoga Chips," which remained popular in the area until Crum died in 1914, when he was listed as the inventor of the chip. A conflicting story states that Crum's sister, Catherine Wicks (a fellow cook at Moon's Lake House), invented the kettle chip. When she died in 1917, she was also listed as the inventor of kettle chips, though her obituary stated that she didn't move to the area until 1861, clashing with reports of the chip's invention in 1853.

According to Saratoga Chips' website and local speculation, George Crum was working at Moon's Lake House on a hot, summer day when a wealthy customer ordered the restaurant's signature fried potatoes, only to complain that the potatoes were not up to his standards. The customer wanted the potatoes thinner, so Crum sliced them, but the customer was still unsatisfied. Crum sliced the potatoes for a third time, making them impossibly thin and dousing them in salt as an unspoken rebuke to the customer's complaints. After deep frying, the chips were crispy and misshapen, only edible as finger food, and thus kettle chips were born (here's the nutritional difference between kettle chips and regular chips).

In reports that state Catherine Wick invented the kettle chip, the story goes that she was frying doughnuts and mistakenly included a few potato slices. Crum supposedly tried the chips and liked them so much that he added them to the menu. Either way, Crum nor his sister patented the chip, allowing other brands to swoop in and create similar versions. Crum's original company shut down in the 1920s. Meanwhile, well-known brands like Cape Cod (here's the best Cape Cod potato chip) and Kettle Brand entered the market in the late 1970s and '80s, dominating the kettle-cooked space. The Saratoga Specialties Company opened in 2009 as an attempt to relaunch Crum's original recipe and take back the kettle-cooked space.