A crisp company, a curl and a note of music.

Quavers began as a Smiths product. English Wikipedia says they were first made in 1968 at the Smiths factory on Newark Road, in the Bracebridge area of Lincoln. The name comes from the quaver, the musical note, because the note and the snack share a curly shape. At launch the snack was described as “curly potato puffs” and advertised with the line “you get a lovely lot of Quavers in a bag,” according to the packaging historian Robert Opie’s The 1970s Scrapbook, as cited by Wikipedia.

Smiths was by then an old name in British crisps. English Wikipedia, citing the BBC and the Daily Telegraph, says the company was founded after the First World War, in 1920, by Frank Smith and Jim Viney, who sold crisps around London in greaseproof paper bags with a twist of salt inside. The American food company General Mills bought Smiths in 1966, so Quavers arrived under American ownership; General Mills sold the business to the British group Associated Biscuits in 1978, the Investors Chronicle reported that year.

The next owners brought Quavers into the same family as its later name. Nabisco bought Associated Biscuits in 1982, putting Smiths under the same owner as its rival Walkers, the Leicester crisp maker founded by Henry Walker in 1948, English Wikipedia says. After the 1988 buyout of RJR Nabisco, several of its businesses were sold to the French group BSN, which sold Smiths and Walkers on to PepsiCo in 1989, UPI and The New York Times reported that July. The New York Times said Smiths then held about a third of the British market for extruded snacks, the category Quavers belongs to.

A new name on the pack and a family made of clay.

Under PepsiCo the Smiths name was gradually taken off its best-known snacks. In January 1993 the Lincolnshire Echo reported that Quavers packets would soon lose their Smiths logo, and the snack has been sold as a Walkers product since. A salt and vinegar flavour arrived the same year, the Leicester Mercury reported in February 1993.

The best-remembered Quavers advertising came three years later. In March 1996 Walkers relaunched the brand with a new look and a campaign made by Aardman Animations, the Bristol studio behind Wallace and Gromit, Campaign reported. The agency was BMP DDB, which had won the account from Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO the year before, and the films introduced the clay Quaverhead family — Quentin, his mother, his father and their dog, Rolf. Campaign said the first 30-second film aired on 11 April, showing Quentin, his family and a floating Quaver against a series of kaleidoscopic sets, and that the films were made predominantly in the brand’s colours of yellow and green. A shorter film launched a Tangy Tomato flavour, in which Quentin’s head turns red with embarrassment. Walkers was repositioning Quavers as a light snack for parents and children to eat between meals, the magazine reported.

The pack has been redrawn many times since. In 1997 Quavers was part of Walkers’ short-lived Snackshack range alongside French Fries and Monster Munch, the Derby Daily Telegraph reported. Limited flavours followed, including Streaky Bacon in 2002, reported by The Grocer, and ghost-shaped cheese Quavers for Halloween in 2004, reported by Marketing Week. In February 2007 Walkers changed the packaging of Quavers, Wotsits, Squares, French Fries and Monster Munch together as it switched them all to sunseed oil, The Grocer reported. In December 2020 Walkers said prawn cocktail and salt and vinegar would return in early 2021, WalesOnline reported; a further packaging refresh came in March 2023 with a BBQ Sauce flavour, Better Retailing reported, and a Red Leicester flavour followed in July 2025, according to Talking Retail.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are savoury snack and crisp brands, mostly British, with one global sister brand: Hula Hoops, Monster Munch, Quavers, Wotsits, McCoy’s, Burts and Lay’s. Snack brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small makers that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket aisle.

A snack brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the shape or flavour it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its snacks are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its snacks are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still made in the city where it started.

Quavers is still made in the city where it was launched. In September 2021 PepsiCo announced a £24.5 million investment in its Lincoln factory to replace existing machinery, add capacity for Quavers and make space for new production lines, Food Manufacture reported. The site’s operations director, Nigel Beilby, said that “for decades” the Lincoln factory had brought Quavers to consumers across the country, and the then business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, said it had been a Walkers site for more than half a century. The new equipment, which included a compact packaging machine meant to cut packaging from the supply chain, was due to be in place by mid-2022.

The company says Quavers is bought by nearly one in three households in the United Kingdom, a figure it gave when announcing the Lincoln investment. The trade press placed the Lincoln plant within a wider PepsiCo manufacturing base in the English Midlands: Food Manufacture reported that the company employed almost 2,000 people across its factories in Lincoln, Leicester and Coventry, and Bakery&Snacks reported in June 2023 that PepsiCo had spent more than £120 million on its British manufacturing since 2020.

The owner on the pack has not changed since 1993. Quavers belongs to Walkers Snack Foods, the Leicester-based business that has been part of PepsiCo since 1989, English Wikipedia says, and Walkers markets it alongside its own crisps, Monster Munch, Wotsits and Doritos. In January 2026 Walkers introduced a new, sun-inspired logo for its own brand, the Daily Mirror reported.

For a design guide, Quavers shows how a name borrowed from music, a single curly shape and a family of clay characters can carry a snack from a Smiths factory in 1968 to a PepsiCo line in the same city today. Compare Wotsits, the cheesy corn puff that Walkers bought in 2002, and Monster Munch, its stablemate from the Snackshack years. For this guide we use a quaver yellow and a leaf green with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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