North Lincolnshire potatoes, sold over the bar.

Pipers was started in 2004 by three men from farming families in North Lincolnshire: Alex Albone, Simon Herring and James Sweeting. The trade site PotatoPro described them in 2018 as three entrepreneurs with farming interests; the company’s own account, now published by PepsiCo, says simply that Pipers was founded by three farmers. The business made its home at Elsham Wold, by the A15, where PotatoPro reported in 2018 that its head office and production sat together and employed about 80 people.

From the beginning the crisps were kettle-cooked, and the founders took them somewhere the big brands were weaker. Rather than chase supermarket shelf space, Pipers sold mainly to the out-of-home trade: pubs, restaurants, cafes, hotels and farm shops. Restaurant Online reported in 2012 that it sold through pubs, coffee shops and independent retailers, not supermarkets, and the pattern still held when PepsiCo bought the business six years later, by which time Bakery and Snacks reported, citing the company, that Pipers was also exported to more than 40 countries.

The flavour line-up was built around provenance. When the company relaunched its look in 2012 as the Pipers Crisp Co, Restaurant Online reported, the new logo carried the words “Made by Farmers” and each pack highlighted where its flavourings came from on the pack. Albone was then the managing director, and the range at the time ran to seven flavours. The company has said that its crisps have won more than 40 Great Taste Awards, a figure reported by Bakery and Snacks in 2018.

From “Made by Farmers” to “Living Life Boldly”.

The brand’s second big redesign arrived in June 2018, and its story is told in an entry to the Design Business Association’s Design Effectiveness Awards in 2019, under the title “Living life boldly”. According to that entry, the business had grown steadily but its growth was slowing by 2016.

The previous pack, the entry says, carried the tagline “made by farmers” and an illustration of the Piper, a figure standing in the middle of a potato field. The redesign kept the character but changed everything around him. The word “crisps” was dropped, so that the brand became simply “Pipers”, a name that could stretch to other snacks. The Piper was redrawn as a Dionysian figure blowing a horn, and the brand idea became “living life boldly”. In June 2019 the company used the shorter name to launch Crispeas, a pea-based snack sold under the Pipers brand.

The entrants credit the design with commercial results. They say the number of outlets stocking Pipers rose from about 12,500 in 2017 to about 14,000 in 2018, without any spending on media advertising. The entry also says that the refreshed brand helped to attract a buyer and facilitated the sale of the business to PepsiCo in March 2019. These are the entrants’ own claims, made for an awards submission.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make crisps, and all of them come from Britain and Ireland: Walkers, Kettle Chips, Tyrrells, Pipers, Golden Wonder, Seabrook and Tayto. British and Irish crisp brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms 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 village pub to a supermarket shelf.

A crisp brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a packet, a name and the flavour or snack 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 crisps 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 crisps are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Bought by the owner of Walkers.

Pipers is owned by PepsiCo, not by KP Snacks. PepsiCo, which owns Walkers in Britain, announced in November 2018 that it had agreed to buy Pipers Crisps, Bakery and Snacks and PotatoPro reported on 6 November 2018. The price was not disclosed by the companies; The Grocer later put the deal at about £20 million. Ian Ellington, then general manager of PepsiCo’s UK business, and Pipers’ managing director James McKinney both commented on the deal when it was announced.

The deal was reviewed by the Competition and Markets Authority, whose case named the target by its company name, Pipers Crisps Limited, keeping the word that the brand itself had dropped from its packs a few months earlier. The CMA cleared the purchase in a decision dated 30 January 2019; Bakery and Snacks reported in March 2019 that the regulator had found Pipers and Walkers were not competing closely for the same customers. The Grocer then reported that PepsiCo had completed the deal, and the Design Business Association entry dates the sale to March 2019.

Pipers has kept its own identity inside PepsiCo. The company’s consumer pages, now hosted by PepsiCo, still describe it as founded in 2004 by three farmers in North Lincolnshire, and say it employs more than 100 people and sells more than 50 million packs to more than 15,000 outlets. Those are the company’s own figures.

The two redesigns frame the brand’s history. The 2012 look put the farmers and the sources of their flavourings on the front of the pack under the “Made by Farmers” line; the 2018 look kept the Piper but redrew him with a horn, shortened the name to one word and swapped the farm for the idea of living life boldly.

For a design guide, Pipers shows how a farm-provenance crisp can trade its farm story for a pub story without losing its character. Compare Walkers, its sister brand at PepsiCo, and Tyrrells, another farmer-founded English crisp. For this guide we use malt brown, harvest gold and a wold green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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