The Little-Known Reason Pringles Aren't Actually Considered Potato Chips

Pringles has always been famous for its branding: the famous tube cans, the identical and stackable shape of each chip, and a food commercial worth watching in the 2024 Super Bowl. You should know it's not truly "potato chips," though. This is a back-and-forth argument which has spanned several decades, but Pringles currently uses the term "potato crisps," which sounds innocent enough until you learn the company was heavily pressured by several groups (including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration) to call its potato-based product something different.

In short, Pringles technically contain potatoes, but not enough to fit the legal definition of a "potato chip," and the potatoes aren't used in the traditional way. The FDA classifies potato chips as "thin slices of potatoes fried in deep fat." Instead of thin potato slices, Pringles are made from dehydrated, processed potato flakes combined with lots of cornstarch and water, which help give each Pringle its identical shape for easy stacking. Competitors like Lay's only list potatoes, vegetable oil, and salt as ingredients in its standard bag of potato chips, while Pringles list "dried potatoes" and many more ingredients such as corn flour, rice flour, and wheat starch. A curvy Pringle is only about 42% potatoes, whereas your average chip is, ideally, only a potato slice.

Pringles' trouble with the "potato chip" term started almost immediately after its debut in the 1960s. A group called the Potato Chip Institute International tried to sue the Pringles owner, Procter & Gamble, for calling its snack a "newfangled potato chip." In 1975, the FDA officially declared that Procter & Gamble can only refer to its product as potato chips if it includes a prominent disclaimer saying that it's actually "potato chips made from dried potatoes." Instead of fighting that, Procter & Gamble started referring to Pringles as "potato crisps," which is the British term for potato chips. Oddly enough, Procter & Gamble claimed in the U.K. that Pringles aren't potato crisps either to avoid paying an extra tax, and the company finally lost this case in 2009. The Pringles brand was sold to Kellogg's a few years later.

To this day, the FDA's official rule is that it's misleading to call a dried potato-based snack with lots of cornstarch a "potato chip." That rather specific rule would apply directly to Pringles and its direct competitors, such as Lay's Stax, which also uses dried potatoes and the term "potato crisps." There is room for flexibility outside of legal definitions, and plenty of people wouldn't complain about homemade air-fryer potato chips or even homemade microwave potato chips. However, when you pick up a Pringle, you're not exactly looking at a thin slice of potato, even if there's potato in it.