You Have a Woman to Thank for Your Fresh Bags of Crunchy Potato Chips

February is a month for the Potato Lovers, so before it (finally) ends, take a moment to pop open and craunch into a fresh packet of your favorite flavor of potato chips. A moment that wouldn’t be possible without Laura Scudder, the nurse, lawyer, scientist, and woman responsible for every fresh bag of potato chips to ever exist.

I love potato chips, and I always have. The height of my obsession was in college, when I’d keep an emergency kettle-cooked bag of barbecue chips in the center console of my Volvo (just in case I got stuck in traffic); I’d scavenge any and every school event where there was an opportunity to bag some free snacks; and occasionally, I’d even treat myself to a simple family-sized bag for breakfast. (Before you judge—worry about your own eating habits.) As an adult, I still find few human experiences as divine as chomping into a chip that’s perfectly folded in two, or, if I’m really lucky, a crispy bite full of burnt little bubbles. 

Naturally… only a woman could have invented such a pleasure overload.

Scudder, aka the Potato Chip Queen of the West, started kettle-frying and storing her own chips in 1926, in a brick building attached to the gas station she and her husband owned. At the time, potato chips were only distributed in small, pick-and-mix-type bags, and because they couldn’t travel well, they were typically cooked and prepared by local grocers, who would scoop them out of big glass cases and barrels, and sell them by the pound. These had to be eaten immediately.

Finally, Scudder took things into her own hands.

Using small wax paper packages, she—and the women she hired—would fill the bags, iron the top shut, and seal the package to ensure optimal freshness. To ensure quality, she also tasted a bag of potato chips out of every pile they packaged every night. (My dream.) Her business became so successful that she built two more locations across the states, and would sell potato chips from Los Angeles County to the Bay Area until her death in 1959. Because the chips would stay so fresh, the slogan of her company was “the noisiest chips in the world.” 

Before Scudder became the big cheese in the potato chip world, she went to nursing school and practiced in Trenton, New Jersey, before meeting her husband and moving to Ukiah, California, where the two operated a restaurant. During that period, she took the bar exam and became the town’s first female attorney, though she never ended up practicing. Instead, with her husband, she built the gas station’s brick building, originally intending to sell the property and make some money. After never being able to find a tenant, they started using the space for potato chip operations. 

During the Great Depression, and following the sudden death of her husband in 1928, Scudder faced a series of challenges, like struggling to buy insurance for her distribution trucks because she was a woman. At the peak of her career, Scudder was offered $9 million for her company (approximately $170 million today), but she refused, worried the sale would jeopardize her employees’ work statuses or pay. Instead, she sold the company a few years later for $6 million, and on the condition that everyone she hired would keep their job and wages. Her business was eventually acquired by Frito-Lay in 1994, but her grandsons, Kent, Craig, and John, still remember her for the recipes she’d make for them as children.

Scudder’s hard work eventually paved the way for the cellophane and glassine bags we use to keep chips fresh today, and honestly, I can’t thank her enough for how much she’s literally changed my life.

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