An Acquired Taste: Germany's Favourite Crisps
...and how their story begins in Ireland
I love going to Ireland to talk about Germany. You never know who or what to expect at talks. That proved true again last weekend when I was in Kilkenny for Kilkenomics, the “world’s first economic and comedy festival”. One of the talks I had been scheduled to do was on Germany’s development since 2015 — heavy stuff, and I worried that nobody would turn up. Instead, I got a full house, warmed up by an Irish comedian delivering German jokes…in German.
Before I even entered the stage, host Barry Murphy had the audience singing German songs and identified that there were 12 “actual Germans” in the audience. As it turned out, Barry does this a lot. A long-standing comedian in Ireland, he usually appears in his trademark wig and as his alter ego Gunther Grun. Well, there was a novel way to begin a discussion of German politics.
Afterwards, we continued the conversation over a pint of Guinness in a pub. Having forgotten to eat lunch, I soon grumbled that I really ought to go and have some food before sampling any more of Ireland’s liquid delicacies. The room contained many people who had been there since lunchtime, and there was collective agreement on the fact that Ireland’s favourite “Tayto” crisps were the answer to my conundrum. Carbs, fat and salt were all I needed, apparently. I shrugged. Who was I to disagree with the locals?
I asked what flavour I should go for and was told: “Cheese and Onion, of course.” I learnt that this is not just the original Tayto flavour, but the original crisp flavour —the first ever to be put on potato crisps commercially. When Tayto was founded in Dublin in 1954, owner Joe “Spud” Murphy found the plain crisps that were the only game in town “insipid” and decided to spice things up. He is credited with being the first to season crisps. The first flavour was Cheese and Onion. In 1966, he followed up with Salt and Vinegar and later Smokey Bacon. The concept of flavoured crisps was an absolute sensation. It soon spread to the US, where companies bought the rights to Tayto’s technique and began seasoning their “chips” as well.
The offering hasn’t changed much since then. In Ireland, they still favour Cheese and Onion, Salt and Vinegar and Smokey Bacon, though other flavours have joined the fray in the last few decades. People like what they like.
“So how come Germany’s taste in crisps is different?” I wondered. Anyone who has ever been to Germany and ventured into a supermarket to buy crisps will have noticed the overwhelming prevalence of one single flavour: paprika.
Germany’s love affair with crisps or “Chips” as they are called in German also goes back to the 1950s. The pioneer of the industry was mechanical engineer Heinz Flessner, an SS veteran who, during the denazification process, was deemed to have been solely focused on the technical part of his job rather than Nazi politics or ideology. He was seen as non-political and therefore allowed to continue his life “on probation”. According to his daughter, he spent his entire post-war life worrying that he might be arrested and charged after all.
After the war, he was first in American captivity and then began helping to build facilities for the occupation forces. He found quickly that many US Army soldiers were homesick and that one of the things they missed most was salted chips. There was clearly a business opportunity here. Flessner and his wife began frying sliced potatoes in their own kitchen. When the products went down well, he used his mechanical skills to build a frying machine before eventually importing used, purpose-built equipment directly from the US. Up until 1959, he only sold salted chips, but then word got around that Tayto’s flavours and spices were beginning to revolutionise the industry.
So what could Flessner put on his chips that was available, interesting and tasty? His nephew Horst Peters had an idea. Why not use powdered paprika? It was easily sourced from Hungary, had a new, almost exotic flavour, and wasn’t too far from the barbecue flavour they had been using in the US since 1954, adapting Tayto’s technique to their own market. So Flessner tried it at a food fair in Frankfurt in 1959. He later noted in a report: “We offered to try: potato chips salted and potato chips with paprika. The salt chips were of no interest. The paprika chips enjoyed enormous interest.”
Others picked up on the same idea, notably the businessman Carlo von Opel (yes, he is related to the car manufacturers), whose dynasty owned land but was keen to “diversify”, as we’d say today. They thought that if they sold their potatoes as processed end products, they could make more money. So Opel and his mother, Imgard, travelled to the US in the early sixties to buy frying equipment to make fries.
Their American counterparts, however, told them that chips were all the rage. So they imported the processing and packaging equipment for that instead. The resulting company was called Chio Chips (short for Carl, Heinz and Irmgard von Opel). This is the root of today’s Intersnack company – a vast snacking empire which owns not just Chio Chips but also Hula Hoops, McCoy’s and, you guessed it, Tayto.
The Opels also tried different flavours: salt, diet salt and paprika. Like Flessner, they found that people loved the latter. There was still a lot of work to do, convincing Germans that chips were a great thing to start with. They were still practically unknown. So Opel and his staff drove from shop to shop across West Germany and offered their wares for tasting. By 1969, nearly 12,000 tonnes of crisps were procured in the country. Today it’s nearly 96 million. Almost half of that huge number is paprika-flavoured. No other flavour gets anywhere close.
Given the dynamics of globalisation, it really is remarkable how little overspill there is from one country to another in terms of crisp flavours. Yes, you can get paprika ones in Britain, but they are a minority choice, just like salt and vinegar has never become mainstream in Germany. That’s very different to the universality of, say, Coca Cola, Smarties or Mars bars, where there is basically one way of doing things that has become so popular that it has caught on across the world.
So what makes crisps special? I guess there is something about them that makes us stick to the flavours we know and love. They enter our lives from a very young age. They accompany good times from lunch breaks to parties and entertainment. From time to time, we try new flavours and enjoy the experiment, but the go-to standard remains set.
My personal crisp journey has come full circle. I’m writing this on my way back home from Ireland, thinking about paprika but munching on Taytos.
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