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!

A classic American consumer food brand gets a new look: But does it work?

“…At the forefront is a new logo set in Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ popular Archer typeface. As for Mr. Quaker, he finds a new home inside the letter Q. Perhaps it’s a result of the new, lighter design (hooray for losing the multiple gradients, shadows, and gold embossing), but the chubby Quaker Man looks out of place here…”

—via “Quaker loves life with Archer” article by Idsgn

We recommend reading the full post by Idsgn, which discusses the evolution of the Quaker Oats logo throughout its long history - including a Saul Bass version in the early 1970s.