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50 free Potato Chip trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
40 free Potato chip trivia questions with answers. Potato chip trivia usually begins and ends with George Crum and the fussy customer in Saratoga Springs, a story historians have long since debunked. This quiz starts there and keeps going: the 1817 English cookbook with the first recipe, the London firm that put a twist of salt in the bag, the Irishman who invented cheese and onion in 1954, the California nurse who ironed wax-paper bags at home, and the chemist who was buried in a Pringles can. The brand round covers Lay's and Frito-Lay, Pringles and its hyperbolic-paraboloid shape, Walkers and its Leicester factory, Tayto, Smith's, Golden Wonder, Cape Cod, Utz, Herr's, Zapp's and Kettle, plus the chips-versus-crisps naming mess across the English-speaking world, kettle-cooked versus continuous frying, and the acrylamide scare. Whether you call them chips or crisps, there is a question here you will get wrong. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the snack and its makers, and each question carries its source. Difficulty ranges from things printed on the bag to details from company histories.
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Q 01The earliest known recipe for potato chips appears in a book published in London in which year?
1817
William Kitchiner's The Cook's Oracle called them 'Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings', cut round and round 'as you would peel a lemon'.
Q 02Legend credits the potato chip to a cook at Moon's Lake House in which New York resort town?
Saratoga Springs
The 1853 story is a myth: the Moons did not even own the Lake House until 1854, and the supposed customer, Cornelius Vanderbilt, was in Europe.
Q 03The 1973 ad campaign that spread the Saratoga myth was run by what kind of company?
A packaging manufacturer
St. Regis Paper made bags for chips; it also introduced the claim that the annoyed diner was Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Q 04The cook at the centre of the Saratoga legend, known as George Crum, was born under what surname?
Speck
He later opened his own restaurant, Crum's, in nearby Malta and did serve 'Saratoga chips' there.
Q 05Which Dayton, Ohio company, founded in 1910, calls itself the oldest US potato chip maker?
Mikesell's
New Hampshire's Granite State Potato Chip Factory was older, founded in 1905, but closed in 2007.
Q 06In the 1920s, Frank Smith sold his crisps around London in greaseproof bags with what tucked inside?
A twist of salt
The blue salt sachet survives in Britain's Salt 'n' Shake brand; crisps stayed otherwise unflavoured until the 1950s.
Q 07The world's first seasoned crisp, cheese and onion, was created in 1954 by which Irish company?
Tayto
Joe 'Spud' Murphy and employee Seamus Burke worked it out by trial and error, and companies worldwide tried to buy the technique.
Q 08Smith's answered its rivals' cheese and onion with which flavour, launched nationally in 1967?
Salt and vinegar
It was tested first by the firm's north-east England subsidiary, Tudor, and started a two-decade flavour war.
Q 09The first flavoured chips in the United States, in the 1950s, were which flavour?
Barbecue
Herr's introduced them in Pennsylvania in 1958, four years after the flavour is first traced.
Q 10What did Laura Scudder have her workers do at home in the 1920s to pioneer sealed potato chip packaging?
Iron sheets of wax paper into bags
The bags were filled at her Monterey Park factory the next day; she was known as the 'Potato Chip Queen of the West'.
Q 11Kettle-cooked chips differ from continuous-process chips because the potato slices are what?
Not rinsed of surface starch and fried in batches
The result is a thicker 'hard-bite' chip; the style was inspired by the Maui Chip.
Q 12Which brand, founded in 1980 by Steve Bernard in Hyannis, popularised the kettle-cooked style in the US?
Cape Cod
He sold his auto-parts business, bought a storefront in Hyannis and a $3,000 industrial slicer.
Q 13In Britain and Ireland, what does the word 'chips' refer to?
French fries
Q 21Charles Elmer Doolin bought the original Fritos corn-chip recipe in San Antonio in 1932 for how much?
$100 borrowed from his mother
The deal also included a potato ricer and 19 retail accounts; output was about ten pounds of chips a day.
Q 22Which stackable Lay's sub-brand was launched to compete with Pringles?
Lay's Stax
Outside North America PepsiCo sells the same chips as Walkers in Britain and Smith's in Australia.
Q 23Walkers was founded in 1948 in which English city, home to the world's largest crisp plant?
Leicester
The plant turns about 800 tons of potatoes into over 11 million bags a day; a bag takes about 35 minutes from raw potato to dispatch.
Hence fish and chips; the thin fried slices are crisps, while Australia and New Zealand call both 'chips'.
Q 14Kellogg's bought Pringles from its inventor in 2012 for roughly how much?
$2.7 billion
The deal made Kellogg's the world's second-largest snack company; Mars later acquired its spun-off snack arm, Kellanova.
Q 15Which company invented Pringles in 1968?
Procter & Gamble
They were first sold as 'Pringle's Newfangled Potato Chips'; Kellogg's bought the brand in 2012 and Mars later bought Kellanova.
Q 16The saddle shape of a Pringle is known mathematically as what?
A hyperbolic paraboloid
Science-fiction author Gene Wolfe, then a mechanical engineer, helped design the machine that cooks them.
Q 17What did Fredric Baur, designer of the Pringles can, ask for after his death in 2008?
Some of his ashes to be buried in one of the cans
His children obliged with an Original-flavour can; the rest of his ashes went in a conventional urn.
Q 18One theory says Pringles were named after what?
A street in suburban Cincinnati
Two P&G advertising staff reportedly lived on Pringle Drive in Finneytown, and the name sounded good with 'potato chips'.
Q 19Herman Lay started out in 1932 selling potato chips from what?
His Ford Model A
He was a travelling salesman for the Barrett Food Company, which he bought in 1938 and renamed after himself.
Q 20H.W. Lay & Company merged in 1961 with which Texas snack maker?
Frito
The combined firm merged with Pepsi-Cola in 1965 to create PepsiCo.
Q 24Before crisps, what business was the Walker family in?
Butchery
Post-war meat rationing hit the shop hard, so in 1948 the firm looked for another product; the first bags sold for threepence.
Q 25Which former England footballer became the face of Walkers crisps in 1995?
Gary Lineker
He was born in the same city as the company.
Q 26Ireland's dominant crisp brand is such a fixture that in 2010 the company opened what?
A theme park
The park is now called Emerald Park; the brand's name is used in Ireland for any make of crisps.
Q 27Which brand overtook Smith's as Britain's top crisp in the 1960s?
Golden Wonder
Founded in 1947, it has been owned since 2006 by a Northern Irish snack group.
Q 28William and Salie Utz began frying chips at home in 1921 in which Pennsylvania town?
Hanover
Their initial investment was $300; Salie cooked and Bill delivered to grocers and farmers' markets as far as Baltimore.
Q 29Jim Herr was how old when he bought a small Lancaster, Pennsylvania chip company in 1946?
21
Herr's is now sold in all 50 states and more than 40 countries.
Q 30Louisiana's Zapp's chips are kettle-cooked in which oil?
Peanut oil
Founder Ron Zappe's first creation, the Cajun Crawtator, was billed in 1985 as the nation's first spicy Cajun chip.