Fred and Ethel Ballreich’s copper kettle.

Ballreich’s is a potato-chip brand from Tiffin, Ohio, in northwest Ohio. The company says it was founded there in 1920, and its history page says Fred and Ethel Ballreich began making chips at home that year, on the dirt floor of a garage, in a copper kettle heated with wood scraps. A report carried by the trade site PotatoPro in April 2019, credited to the Toledo station WTOL, likewise said the Ballreich family had owned and operated the business since 1920.

The chips had a particular shape from the start. The company says Fred and Ethel made “marcelled” chips, a word it glosses as wavy and says was taken from the marcel wave, a ladies’ hairstyle popular in the 1920s. The word remains part of the story the company tells about its chips.

The business soon needed more hands. According to the company, Fred’s brother Carl Ballreich left the Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan, to join, together with his wife, Emma. The two couples lived side by side and, the company says, eventually built a small factory behind their homes.

After the Second World War a second generation came in. The company names Fred’s sons Doyle and Nevin, Carl’s sons Owen and Don, and Carl’s son-in-law Robert Reis, and says the business was incorporated at that time as Ballreich Bros., Inc. In the post-war years, it says, sacking machines were added, a warehouse was built in Defiance, Ohio, to serve that part of the state, and an automatic slicer, salter, hopper filler and kettle were installed, with liquid shortening replacing the solid form.

Heat-sealed bags, new flavors and a family handover.

The company’s account of the following decades is one of gradual change. It says a hydraulic lift and an extra warehouse were added in the 1960s, and that the plant began heat-sealing its bags of potato chips to keep them fresh and speed up packing. As older equipment was replaced, it says, production rose, and more potato-chip flavors were introduced.

In the 1990s, according to the company, the line widened beyond chips to include party mix, pretzels, pork rinds and popcorn. After 2000 it says it brought in new software, expanded its sales and marketing, gave its sales representatives handheld computers and extended its service into the Mansfield, Ohio, area.

The family handover the company describes came in 2006, when, it says, Carl’s grandson Brian Reis and his wife, Linda, became the sole owners. The 2019 PotatoPro report, citing a press release, also described Brian Reis as the grandson of the original owners and said he and Linda Reis had managed and grown the company since 2006. In the same year, the company says, Ballreich’s became the official chip of the Toledo Mud Hens baseball team. It says a great-granddaughter, Haley, joined the business in 2007, and that Carl’s great-grandson Rob Reis joined as a process manager and engineer in 2011.

The company lists new products through those years: chocolate potato chips, cheese puffs and corn puffs in 2007, and potato sticks in 2014. It says 2015 brought improvements to the plant, a food-safety certification and the opening of the Granny Ballreich’s Company Store, but also fires in the plant, after which it resumed production; it says it added online ordering on a new website the following year.

Quoted in the 2019 report, Brian and Linda Reis pointed to growth in their markets and to food-safety certification among the things they had achieved over their years in charge.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sit on three different shelves of the grocery aisle: olive oil, pancake and baking mix, and the salty snacks of pretzels and potato chips. Each category has its own packaging habits, and a brand’s identity is often carried less by the food itself than by the tin, bottle, box or bag that holds it, and by the name printed across the front.

An olive-oil tin or bottle tends to lean on a family name, a place and a sense of origin. A pancake-mix box is built around a front panel that has to be read at a glance, with a picture of the finished stack and instructions on the side or back. A pretzel or chip bag has to work as a flat, printed surface that is folded, sealed and stacked, so colour, a wordmark and a window or photograph of the contents do much of the work.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the business, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Ballreich Bros. to a Cincinnati chip maker.

The family sold the business in 2019. In April that year, the PotatoPro report said, Ballreich Bros. Inc. announced that it had been sold to Ballreich Snack Food Company, an investor group formed by northwest Ohio business professionals who wanted to keep the company going; according to the press release it quoted, the group was already discussing expansion. The company’s own history describes the buyers in the same way and says they kept manufacturing at the existing plant in Tiffin, bought new equipment including a quality lab, new scales and new sacking machinery, and kept the staff who came with the purchase.

The centenary followed. For its centenary, the company says, Ballreich’s added Honey Butter, Sweet Thai Chili and Smoked Cheddar flavors, and it says it teamed up with Huy Fong Foods, the Sriracha maker, on a series of Sriracha-flavored potato products. In 2021, according to the company, it introduced sweet potato chips and renamed its Fantastic Flats as Classic Thins.

A second sale followed in 2023. On 26 September 2023 the trade publication Vending Times, citing a report by the Cincinnati station WLWT, said Grippo’s, a Cincinnati potato-chip maker, had acquired Ballreich Snack Food Co. of Tiffin, and that Grippo’s president, Teri Baker, said both brands would be maintained. Grippo’s has owned Ballreich’s since 2023. The brand’s website now names the business as Ballreich Foods, LLC, gives Tiffin as its home and describes the company as founded there in 1920.

The brand’s history page tells its story through the garage, the copper kettle and the wavy chip named after a hairstyle. It says the 2019 buyers put measures in place to maintain product consistency, and describes the staff who stayed on as loyal to the Ballreich brand.

For a design guide, Ballreich’s shows how a regional chip maker can carry a single word — marcelled — through a century and changes of owner. Compare Mike-sell’s, another Ohio chip maker, and Old Dutch, a family chip brand from Minnesota. For this guide we use Tiffin blue, copper kettle and chip gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ballreich’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.