A legal battle spanning three levels of the British court system produced three different rulings on a single question: whether the snack sold in the red can is legally a potato chip. The outcome determined whether the company behind it owed tens of millions of pounds in taxes. The story begins in 1956, when Procter & Gamble started receiving a steady stream of customer complaints about ordinary potato chips. They were too greasy, broke easily, went stale quickly, and packages seemed to contain more air than product.
Management decided the solution was not a better chip but a fundamentally different product. The task went to a young organic chemist named Fred Bower, whose background included work on frying oils, freeze-drying technology for ice cream, and Navy research into how high-altitude stress affected the human body. Bower worked methodically for two years. He developed the saddle-shaped form that allowed chips to stack tightly in a uniform column, and the cylindrical can that protected them from breakage during long-distance shipping.
There was one problem: he could not find a flavor that satisfied the company’s taste testers. Management removed him from the project, and the man who invented the product’s core shape and packaging was reassigned to other work. In the mid-1960s, another researcher, Alexander Liepa, returned to the shelved project and refined the taste of the chips made from dehydrated potato dough. In 1968, the product reached the market as Pringles New Fangled Potato Chips.
When the company filed a patent in 1976, only Liepa’s name appeared. Bower, who spent two years inventing the chip’s distinctive geometry and the can design, was not listed as an inventor. Other snack manufacturers soon complained about the new product, arguing that it was made from dehydrated potato dough rather than real sliced potatoes, so calling it a chip misled consumers. In 1975, the US Food and Drug Administration ruled that the company could use the word “chip” only with the wording “potato chips made from dried potatoes” printed in full on every package.
Instead, the company coined its own word, “crisps,” and used it on packaging and advertising. More than 30 years later, that word became central to a legal dispute in the United Kingdom. In the mid-2000s, the British tax authority demanded VAT at 17. 5 percent, the rate applied to ordinary potato chips rather than the zero rate given to most food.
The company argued in court that its own product, whose can said “potato chips,” was not actually a chip. Lawyers noted that potatoes made up only 42 percent of the dough, the rest being starch, flour, and fats, and that the perfectly uniform saddle shape was not found in nature. A tax tribunal ruled against the company. In 2008, the High Court in London sided with it, agreeing that the 42 percent potato content and unnatural shape meant the product was not a chip.
A year later, the Court of Appeal overturned that decision. The judge said 42 percent potato content was more than enough for a reasonable person to consider the product made from potato, adding that a child buying crisps could understand that faster than a food technologist. The product was officially recognized as a potato crisp, and the company faced liability for around 100 million pounds in VAT accumulated during the dispute. It later emerged that the company had continued paying the tax voluntarily throughout the proceedings, so it owed no actual debt.
The saddle-shaped geometry invented by Bower found an unexpected second life. Mathematicians and engineers began using it as a reference when teaching students about hyperbolic paraboloids, a surface curving upward in one direction and downward in the other, and the shape became commonly known in engineering circles as “the Pringles shape. ”
Gene Wolfe, later one of the most respected science fiction authors of the 20th century and best known for “The Book of the New Sun,” worked as a mechanical engineer on the production equipment that made it possible to manufacture the chips at industrial scale. By the early 2010s, the product was sold in more than 140 countries and ranked among the most recognizable snack brands on the planet.
Bower continued working at Procter & Gamble for many years after being removed from the chip project. The patent remained registered in another person’s name, and Bower reportedly did not fight for official recognition during his lifetime. In his final years, he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and died in 2008, just short of his 90th birthday. According to family recollections, he had told those close to him that he wanted part of his ashes buried in a can of his own invention.
His children took the request seriously. They placed part of his cremated remains in an original-flavor can and buried it with the rest of his ashes at a cemetery in a Cincinnati suburb. A small portion of the ashes also went to one of his grandchildren. The result was a poignant and slightly absurd ending: a man not named in the official patent was literally laid to rest inside the packaging of his own invention.
After decades under Procter & Gamble, the brand nearly passed to Diamond Foods in 2011 in a deal valued at around $1. 5 billion. The transaction fell apart after an accounting scandal on the buyer’s side involving improperly recorded payments to walnut farmers. A year later, in 2012, Kellogg’s acquired the brand for $2.
7 billion, one of the largest purchases in its history. The brand remains in its portfolio today and continues to be a major revenue source in the snack segment. The product is now sold worldwide, with flavor lineups ranging from classic salted to regional varieties such as boiled shrimp flavor in some Asian countries and spicy wasabi in others. The tube-shaped packaging has become so strongly associated with the product that competitors in similar containers have faced accusations of copying its visual style for years.
The product’s official status remains ambiguous. In Britain, it is legally a potato crisp and subject to the same tax as chips made from sliced potatoes. In America, the company cannot legally use the word “chip,” only “crisp,” a term invented half a century ago to navigate regulatory wording. And the name of the man who invented the shape behind the billion-dollar brand still does not appear in the official patent.
He now lies underground in a Cincinnati suburb inside a can bearing his own invention, a recognition more personal and literal than any legal document.