Lay's crisps began in the boot of a salesman's car
Herman Lay started selling snacks in Nashville in 1932 and drove across the American South peddling potato chips from the trunk of his car. Three decades later his company merged with the maker of Fritos, and the combined firm had higher sales than any other manufacturer of its kind.
In 1938 Lay bought an Atlanta potato chip maker, the Barrett Food Company, and renamed it after himself. The 1961 merger with the Frito Company, founded by Charles E. Doolin, created Frito-Lay, with annual sales above $127 million. Soon afterwards came the slogan that stuck: betcha can't eat just one. By 1965 revenue had passed $180 million, with more than 8,000 workers and 46 plants, and that year Frito-Lay joined the Pepsi-Cola Company to form PepsiCo.
The product kept changing. A crispier, longer-lasting recipe arrived in 1991, followed by Wavy chips, a baked lower-calorie version and a fat-free line using the fat substitute olestra. In the 2000s came kettle-cooked chips and Stax, stackable crisps aimed squarely at Pringles. The classic chips were fried in hydrogenated oil until 2003. By 2012 Frito-Lay products held 59 percent of the American savoury snack market.
The chips go by many names abroad. The same company sells them as Walkers in the UK and Ireland, Smith's in Australia, Sabritas in Mexico and Tapuchips in Israel. In India a potato variety grown for the brand led to a legal fight: in 2019 the company's Indian arm took four Gujarat smallholders to court for growing it, then withdrew the cases after talks with the government and pressure from activists. The variety's registration was revoked in 2021 and restored by the Delhi High Court in 2024.
Nutritionally, a 28-gram serving of regular chips contains 160 kilocalories and 10 grams of fat, and one serving can hold as much as 380 milligrams of sodium. Vitamin C is the most plentiful vitamin, at 10 percent of the daily requirement per serving.
Source: Lay's
