1954, when a pub lunch turned into a seasoning
Walkers introduced Cheese and Onion in 1954, drawing on the ploughman's lunch. That makes it the earliest of the Walkers flavours that people still reach for by name, arriving well before Salt and Vinegar in 1967, which was tied to the British fondness for putting vinegar on chips. Prawn Cocktail followed in the 1970s, when the dinner-party starter was having its moment, and Roast Chicken took its cue from the Sunday roast. There is a pattern there worth noticing. Walkers did not conjure flavours out of nowhere. It looked at what British people were already eating, in pubs and at kitchen tables, and worked out how to get it into a bag. Cheese and onion was the first of those translations, and it has never really been shifted from the top.
Est 1948, and the butcher who ran short of meat
The date stamped on the packet is doing more work than it lets on. Walkers was founded in Leicester in 1948 by Henry Walker, but the family had been in food in that city since the 1880s, when Henry James Walker moved from Mansfield to take over a butcher's shop in the High Street. The crisp business came out of a problem rather than a plan. Post-war meat rationing made life difficult for a meat business, and managing director R.E. Gerrard steered the company towards potatoes instead. The earliest Walkers crisps were hand-sliced, fried, sprinkled with salt and sold for threepence a bag. No flavours yet, no multipacks, no foil. Just a butcher's business making the best of a shortage, which is about as British an origin story as anyone could reasonably ask for.
The names above the door, kept mercifully brief
The Walker family sold the business in 1970 to Standard Brands, an American food producer, which later merged with Nabisco to form Nabisco Brands in 1981. PepsiCo has owned Walkers since 1989 and uses the name as the local equivalent of Lay's in the UK and Ireland. That explains the family resemblance people sometimes spot on a Canadian shelf, and also why a British shopper will walk straight past a very similar looking bag to find this one. The Walkers name also became the banner over a fair chunk of the British snack aisle, with Quavers, Wotsits and Monster Munch sitting under it, and Smiths kept on as a sub-brand for the likes of Chipsticks and Frazzles. Written down it looks like a tidy line of succession. It was almost certainly messier at the time.
Leicester, foil and a footballer
Through all of that, Leicester stayed put. The city is still closely tied to the brand, and the production base there became one of the most significant crisp-making sites in Britain. The practical side of the modern bag came later: foil packaging from 1993, then nitrogen filling from 1996 to help keep the crisps fresh. Nobody has ever grown sentimental about nitrogen, but it is part of why a 25g bag can survive a lunchbox, a rucksack and a parcel across the Atlantic without arriving as crumbs. Leicester supplied the face of the adverts too. Gary Lineker, the former England footballer, has fronted Walkers since the mid-1990s, which is long enough that a whole generation cannot see the name without expecting some mild mischief.
Why twelve bags never last twelve days
For British shoppers in Canada, cheese and onion is usually near the top of the list when someone starts naming what they miss. Not crisps in general. This one, in this bag, with that smell when it is opened slightly too early on a coach. A multipack of twelve is a small act of optimism: enough for the week, enough for lunches, enough that nobody needs to ration. In practice it goes into the cupboard on the Sunday and someone is counting the survivors by the Wednesday. The Great British Shop is happy to keep supplying more, and equally happy not to ask who took the last one.
