Smiths Salt & Vinegar Chipsticks - 6 pack

The Smiths name is older than the packet lets on

Smith's Potato Crisps was founded in 1920 by Frank Smith and Jim Viney, selling crisps around London in greaseproof paper bags with a twist of salt inside. Frank Smith had come to it through a Smithfield wholesale grocery business, and the first factory was a row of converted garages in Cricklewood, London, supplying local businesses. That little blue sachet, the one that let people salt their own crisps, is the detail everybody still remembers, and it is a fair summary of the company's whole approach: practical, mildly fiddly, and oddly beloved. Smiths grew quickly into larger production and became one of the big forces in British crisps before flavoured snacks properly took over the shelves.

No tidy invention story for Chipsticks, and that is all right

There is no origin record here for Chipsticks themselves, so the honest thing to say is that this is the story of the brands behind the box rather than a neat tale of somebody inventing a stick-shaped snack on a particular wet Tuesday. What can be said is where the flavour belongs. Salt and vinegar became part of this family's language in 1967, when Walkers introduced it as a crisp flavour drawing on the national fondness for fish and chips. Vinegar on fried potato was never going to need explaining in Britain, and putting it on something thinner and crunchier was less an invention than a formality.

Two crisp companies, one very tangled snack aisle

The reason a Smiths product now sits under the Walkers banner is a long British story of brands changing hands and then never mentioning it again. During the Nabisco era, Walkers, Smiths and Tudor Crisps ran as separate brands inside the same UK snack division, with Tudor more associated with northern England and Smiths concentrated more in the south. Smiths passed through several owners along the way, including General Mills, Associated Biscuits and Nabisco, before Smiths and Walkers both came under PepsiCo ownership in 1989. Walkers had begun somewhere else entirely, in Leicester in 1948, when post-war meat rationing pushed a butcher's business towards potatoes and the earliest bags were hand-sliced, salted and sold for threepence. Today Smiths is kept on as a sub-brand of Walkers, covering Chipsticks alongside Frazzles, Bacon Fries and Scampi Fries. Old names do not always die. Sometimes they just get a smaller corner of the box.

What a box of these is actually for

For British shoppers in Canada, Chipsticks are one of the things that refuse to translate. You cannot point at a Canadian shelf and say it is basically the same, because it is not, and the nearest anyone gets is a vague gesture and a disappointed face. So a six pack ends up doing a job that has very little to do with being hungry. One goes in a lunchbox because that is where it always went. One comes out when somebody has had a long week and fancies five minutes of being fourteen again. They get rationed by a parent and then quietly raided by the same parent. Corner shops, school breaks, the newsagent on the walk home, a grandparent's cupboard with suspiciously good snack discipline: the flavour hauls all of it back without asking permission first. The Great British Shop keeps a few boxes within reach for exactly that reason, which makes no sense at all until you have been a long way from home.