Forget Cheese and Onion. The future is ethically made crisps.

 

Last week we stayed a night at the Bear Inn at Rodborough. Built in the late C17th it later became a popular coaching inn, and derived its name by the fact that bear baiting once took place in its grounds. 

The Inn has been greatly extended since the C18th but it still has a Dickensian vibe standing proud on Rodborough Common. 

 

This bear presently guarding the foyer seems content enough, albeit quiet. 

Inside, the inn is quirky with its corridors and unexpected rooms, but all was not well in the kingdom of Mike. There were no fires—hearths and unlit logs, but no fires. Worse the beer was cloudy. The first pint, a Stroud brew, was cloudy but drinkable. The second pint, pale ale, was also cloudy but tasted foul. This time, I did complain and the beer was replaced with a crystal clear Japanese lager. 

But this isn’t the point of this particular  blog. Sitting  in one of the rooms with a fireless fire, I found myself reading an empty crisp packet. My kindle had run out of charge, but the crisp packet proved more than a substitute. I wasn’t so much reading about a packet of crisps, but a mission statement delivered with evangelical zeal. On finishing it, I felt like standing up and bellowing Hosanna!

This was a far cry from the early days of the crisp industry and the cutthroat wars of the 1970s and 80s.

My first introduction to Smith’s Crisps was the factory scrapings sold in one penny conical bags at a nearby sweetshop. Grease with a crunch and not a hosanna in sight—nor any notion of the origins of Smith’s Crisps. 

Frank Smith, born in 1875 started his crisp business in the garage of the Crown Hotel in Cricklewood. His wife, Jessie did all the peeling, slicing and frying whilst young Frank went pottering around  London in his horse and cart selling them. Within a year he was employing twelve full time staff and in 1927 had opened a factory in Brentford. 

Mission statements had no place in Frank Smith’s world. His crowning act of genius was the little blue bag of salt in every packet of crisps. This encouraged pubs to stock them for they increased both thirst and beer sales. 

By the second half of the C20th, Smith’s had serious competition—most particularly, Golden Wonder and Walker’s Crisps. Other than their product, they had one thing in common, a pathological eagerness to sell their crisps anywhere and to everyone. Not for them the namby-pamby selling point of only selling their crisps to those worthy of eating them. The crisp wars had begun.

Golden Wonder’s chief claim to fame was their cheese and onion crisps in 1962. Unperturbed, Smith’s hit back at them with their claim to have introduced chicken flavoured crisps the year before. But now Walkers entered the fray with their smoky bacon crisps and chipsticks, followed by roast chicken, and beef and onion flavoured crisps. In every war, there is misinformation, truth suffers as do ethics. Walkers, I'm looking at you. (British Made Chips, look away. This may offend you). 

Smith’s ended up being absorbed by Walkers, and Golden Wonder went into administration in January 2006.

I finished off my ethically sourced crisps and left the still  fireless room. I’m sure British Made Crisps have a future. After all, in the UK we consume ten billion packets of crisps or a hundred packets per person a year. And ethically made crisps, must surely have a more pleasing taste?