“Once you pop, you can’t stop,” may have been the slogan for Pringles from 1996 until 2022 but it continues to hold true: Once you start eating these crunchy potato snacks, it’s hard to not eat through the whole tube. The iconic tennis-ball-can-like package with a solid vibrant color and filled with stackable, uniformly oval-shaped chips sets Pringles apart from other potato chip brands.
But if you’ve ever questioned if they are really potato chips, you’re not alone. The company has defended its potato-type product both in the United States and in England. After all, the ingredient list includes dried potatoes, yellow corn flour, corn starch, rice flour, wheat starch, and more, which aren’t the typical ingredients list on a bag of potato chips. Can Pringles really be considered potato chips when they are made with an array of ingredients beyond just potatoes, oil, salt, and flavoring?
Pringles Fights for Its Rights… on Two Continents
That’s just what competing potato chip companies said in the mid-1970s, when they challenged the company’s labeling of its product as Pringle’s Newfangled Potato Chips. The FDA eventually ruled in 1977 that they could call Pringles potato chips but they had to add a label stating they’re “potato chips made from dried potatoes.” Instead, the company pivoted to the term “potato crisps” to get around the labeling.
Curiously, calling them potato crisps worked until Pringles ran into labeling issues in the United Kingdom, where potato chips are known as crisps. Many snack products in England have a value-added tax (VAT) and potato chips or crisps, make the list. Parent company Proctor and Gamble went to court in England in 2008, now claiming the contrary—that Pringles weren’t potato chips or crisps– to avoid paying 17.5 percent in VAT. The defense was creative—since Pringles were less than 50% made of potatoes, the company claimed they weren’t actually potato crisps nor did they have the shape of a potato chip. Initially, the London High Court sided with Proctor and Gamble, ruling the company free of paying VAT. That is, until a year later, when the Court of Appeals overruled their decision and the company was required to pay more than $160 million in back taxes to the British government. I reached out to Pringles (owned by Kellogg’s since 2012) about the court cases. They didn’t comment.
What Are Pringles Really, Then?
Whether you call them crisps or not, it’s clear from the ingredients list that Pringles aren’t a typical potato snack. What the company was willing to comment on, was this: “While ’potato chips’ refer to products made from frying thin slices of potato in deep fat—we do things a bit differently at Pringles to deliver a flavorful product that stands out among the rest,” says Mauricio Jenkins, US marketing lead for Pringles. “The delicious crisps our fans know and love are made with real potatoes we form into a ‘hyperbolic paraboloid shape’ that is fried and seasoned just right before placing them into our iconic can.”
And if you’re curious about how each Pringle gets its seasoning, there’s a special system that the company has been using for decades. “The seasoning system we use is a waterfall process where seasoning gets sprinkled on, instead of [using] a tumbler like other chip processes,” says Jenkins. “Our crisps have been created with this same flavor-intensifying process since we first introduced them in 1968. The process sets us apart from other potato-based products, and we proudly tout our unique crisp process in all that we do.”
So: Call them potato chips, crisps, or just call them Pringles, there’s no denying these are a savory snack that are near-impossible to eat in moderation. Because once you pop, you can’t stop.
