Pringles: it all started with a cookie, and went to a robotic chair

Officially, Pringles chips have long been called cookies, since the potato content in them is low - only 42%, the rest is flour and starch. Thanks to this combined approach, Procter & Gamble, which owned the brand until 2011, managed to avoid paying the increased tax for a long time, it was quite expensive to produce chips in the UK.

In 1956, Procter & Gamble employee Alexander Liepa, who was a chemist by profession, came up with a recipe for these chips. But it took him several more years to perfect it and seek investment, so Pringle's Newfangled Potato Chips did not appear in the North American market until October 1968.

According to one version, the name came about completely by accident. Procter & Gamble employees broke their heads trying to invent it. Some of them, leafing through the directory, saw the name of Pringle Drive, which was located in the town of Cincinnati, Ohio. There is another story - the chips were named after Mark Pringle, who in 1937 proposed a new way to process potatoes. Be that as it may, the name Pringles really liked the management of the company and it was approved.

In May 2009, the High Court of London ruled the chips to be potato, so Procter & Gamble had to pay £ 100m ($ 156m) in value added tax over the years when the chips were sold as a snack in the UK, as well as pay out in the future. £ 20 million a year.

In 1994, the UK entered into force a law establishing the procedure for levying value added tax. According to the rules, there is no tax on most food in the country. The only exceptions are products made from potatoes, including French fries, chips and similar items. For several years, Procter & Gamble has argued that its chips contain too little potatoes to be taxed.

In 2011, Procter & Gamble decided to sell the rights to the Pringles brand to Diamond Foods Inc, valuing it at $ 2,35 billion. But for some unknown reason, the deal did not materialize. However, in 2012, Kellogg's, a leading food manufacturer in the United States, bought the brand for $ 2,7 billion.

In 2018, Kellogg's and Vietnamese fast food maker Acecook teamed up to bring instant noodles to the market, also called Pringles, with the famous Julius Pringle on the packaging. At first, noodles were sold only in Japan, and then appeared in the United States.

In February 2020, Kellogg's launched the Feeder gaming chair in partnership with Gravitonus, a WARP division. It has a built-in fitness bracelet, it monitors the behavior of the gamer and sends data to a special application. Based on them, the program calculates the optimal rhythm of the game for the owner. In addition, a robotic arm is installed on the chair, which brings chips to the player's mouth when he is hungry.

Today Pringles are sold in 140 countries around the world. And for each of them, Kellogg's marketers have formed a specific line of this brand's chips.