A husband and wife, a home kitchen and deliveries to Baltimore.

Utz is an American brand of potato chips, pretzels and other salty snacks from Hanover, Pennsylvania. The trade magazine Baking Business, in a company profile by Dan Malovany published on 25 October 2021, says the business was founded in 1921 by William (Bill) and Salie Utz, who believed they could make better potato chips in a simple, farm-fresh way. English Wikipedia gives the early trading name as Hanover Home Brand Potato Chips and says the couple began by making chips in their home.

English Wikipedia also describes a division of labour in those early years. Salie cooked the chips, it says, and Bill delivered them to grocery stores and farmers’ markets around Hanover and around Baltimore, Maryland. The same article says the operation later moved into a concrete building in the family’s backyard, that the couple bought an automatic fryer in 1938, and that a new production facility was built in Hanover in 1949.

The business stayed in the family for decades. English Wikipedia says Francis Xavier Rice joined the company in 1938 after marrying Arlene Utz, later became its president, and was followed in that role by his son Michael Rice in 1978. When the company went public in 2020, its announcement, issued on Business Wire on 28 August 2020, described the Rice and Lissette family as the founding family and owners of Utz, and said that Dylan Lissette had served as chief executive since 2013.

Hanover has remained the centre of the business. The 2020 announcement said the newly formed Utz Brands would stay headquartered in the town. Baking Business reported in 2021 that when the company’s chief supply chain officer, Tucker Lawrence, joined the firm, the then family-owned business had just built another snack food facility in Hanover, and that Utz still ran a local company store there for its hometown customers.

From a family firm to a listed company and a new partner.

For much of the twentieth century Utz grew in and around Hanover. The pace changed in the 2010s. English Wikipedia lists a run of acquisitions: Zappe Endeavors, the maker of Zapp’s potato chips, in 2011; The Bachman Company, with its manufacturing facility in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, in 2012; the snack company Golden Flake in 2016; Phoenix-based Inventure Foods, whose brands included Boulder Canyon, in 2017; and Snyder of Berlin, from Berlin, Pennsylvania, in 2019. The article also says a planned 2009 merger with Snyder’s of Hanover was abandoned after an inquiry by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

The ownership structure changed in 2020. The Business Wire release of 28 August 2020 said Utz Quality Foods and Collier Creek Holdings, a special purpose acquisition company, had completed a business combination to form Utz Brands, Inc., whose common stock would trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “UTZ” from 31 August 2020. Roger Deromedi, formerly chairman of Pinnacle Foods, was to become chairman of Utz Brands, the release said, while Lissette would continue to lead the business with the existing management team.

The listed company kept expanding. Baking Business wrote in October 2021 that Utz operated plants in Pennsylvania, Alabama, Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan and Washington, and that it sold its snacks under brands including Utz, On The Border, Boulder Canyon and Zapp’s. The Shelby Report, in March 2022, described the company’s products as distributed nationally through grocery, mass merchandise, club, convenience and drug stores.

A further change was announced in 2026. On 21 July 2026 Intersnack Group, which English Wikipedia describes as a German snack manufacturer, published a release saying it had entered into a definitive agreement with Utz Brands under which it would acquire all of the company’s outstanding Class A common stock. On closing, the release said, Utz would become a private company, owned in equal shares by Intersnack Group and the Rice and Lissette Family Entities. The release quoted Lissette, as chairperson of the Utz board, saying the company was excited to partner with the Intersnack team, and quoted Intersnack’s executive chairman Johan van Winkel saying the group did not currently have a presence in the U.S. snacking market.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell chips, pretzels, jerky and cookies, and snack brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a petrol-station counter to a supermarket aisle.

A snack brand’s identity is usually carried less by any single product than by a bag, a pack and a name, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its baking or frying to another plant, or grown far beyond the town where it started. A chip bag, a jerky pack or a cookie package sits on a crowded shelf, and each guide looks at the colours, lettering and characters a brand uses there. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its snacks are actually made.

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

A bob, a bow and a hand reaching into the chip bag.

The brand’s visual signature is a character rather than a typeface. PhillyVoice reported on 17 May 2019 that the Little Utz Girl had served as the company’s mascot since the 1920s, when Bill and Salie Utz hired a firm to create a lasting image for their line of chips, and that she was featured on each bag of Utz potato chips. English Wikipedia describes the early drawing as realistic: a young, dark-haired girl with a bow, a bob hairstyle and blushing cheeks, reaching into a bag of potato chips.

The version familiar today came later. PhillyVoice said the current Little Utz Girl was the result of a redesign in the 1960s and a retouching in the 1970s that made her less life-like and more cartoonish. English Wikipedia adds that later versions of the logo let the “U” of the Utz wordmark double as the chip bag she reaches into.

In 2019 the character changed again. PhillyVoice reported that Utz had unveiled a three-dimensional, animated Little Utz Girl ahead of a media campaign launching on 20 May 2019, with 15- and 30-second spots on regional television in Philadelphia, central Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, as well as on social and digital platforms. The campaign also introduced a sidekick, Salty the cat. The article quoted Lissette, from the company’s release, saying the Little Utz Girl represented the company’s nearly 100-year heritage and embodied everything important about Utz.

The packaging was refreshed three years later. The Shelby Report wrote on 15 March 2022 that Utz marked National Potato Chip Day on 14 March with a new look for its Utz brand potato chips, one that built on the classic look with a few modern tweaks. Each package, the report said, would carry a Family Crafted Flavor badge, and the design would still feature the Little Utz Girl, whom the company described as the embodiment of all things honest and good.

For a design guide, Utz shows how one hand-drawn character can be redrawn over a century — realistic in the 1920s, simplified in the 1960s and 1970s, animated in 2019 — while keeping her bow, her bob and her place on the bag. Compare the guides for Wise and Herr’s. For this guide we use chip-bag red, Hanover navy and toasted gold with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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