Pringles

Pringles is a brand of potato and wheat based stackable snack chips originally developed by Procter & Gamble (P&G), who first sold the product in 1967. P&G sold the brand to Kellogg in 2012.

P&G wanted to create a perfect chip to address consumer complaints about broken, greasy, and stale chips, as well as air in the bags. The task was assigned to chemist Fredric Baur, who, from 1956 to 1958, created Pringles’ saddle shape from fried dough, and the can to go with it. Baur could not figure out how to make the chips taste good and he eventually was pulled off the Pringles job to work on another brand. In the mid-1960s, another P&G researcher, Alexander Liepa of Montgomery, Ohio, restarted Baur’s work, and set out to improve on the Pringles taste, which he succeeded in doing. While Baur was the true inventor of the Pringles chip, according to the patent, Liepa was the inventor of Pringles. Gene Wolfe, a mechanical engineer-author known for science fiction and fantasy novels, developed the machine that cooks them. Their consistent saddle shape is mathematically known as a hyperbolic paraboloid. Their design is reportedly aided by supercomputers to ensure safe aerodynamics while packaging.

Originally marketed as "Pringles Newfangled Potato Chips", Pringles are sold in more than 140 countries, and have yearly sales of more than US$1.4 billion.