Packaging is everything

When I started working at Kraft in 1963, part of my orientation was a visit to its research center in Glenview, IL. Since I’m a potato-chip junkie, one project that I thought was really neat was a small pilot operation producing potato-chip look-alike products that tasted wonderful. Of course, they were right out of the hot oil, when just about anything would taste wonderful. 

The product never made it out of research, and I didn’t give it any more thought until Pringles hit the market a few years later. I’m sure that P&G would say that Pringles are entirely different, but it seems to me that the really significant difference was the uniform shape of the chips that enables them to be packed in the iconic tubular carton. 

Considering the marketing brilliance that Kraft has displayed over the years, I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if they had taken that final marketing step to come up with the uniform chips. We might have Kringles instead of Pringles. (I realize that kringle is a term for a Danish pastry, and I’m not saying that Kraft would have usurped this term—it just has a nice symmetry.)

“Too often we . . . enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” 
— John F. Kennedy

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