Procter & Gamble sells Pringles for $2.35 billion - yes, billion

An unlikely marriage of innovative packaging, food engineering and super-consistent branding, Pringles was sold this week to Diamond Foods.

This New York Times article offers a fascinating history of Pringles. When first launched in the late 60s, they were the result of over ten years of R&D by P&G. Since the mid 50s, they had been trying to find a way to leverage their cooking oil expertise and distribution network to create a snack food brand.

Their unique form and packaging of Pringles was due to the constraints created by P&G’s other products: Mainly soaps and oils, their weight and lifespan meant that P&G’s distribution model couldn’t cope with shorter-shelf-life and fragility of traditional crisps.

The P&G employee who eventually solved all these problems was a chemist called Frederic Baur - who engineered a consistently shaped crisp by pressing dehydrated potato flakes into a mould. He also came up with the ubiquitious can as a means of protecting the product in transit.

This functional solution became so much a part of the brand’s success that Frederic Baur asked for his ashes to be interred in a Pringles can when he died in 2008.

There’s an aspiration for us all: Create a brand solution so strong that you’re buried with it!