Hand-made chips in brown paper bags, sold from a store in Berwick.

Wise is an American brand of potato chips and salty snacks from Berwick, Pennsylvania. Its founder was Earl Wise Sr., and the year was 1921. A history page on the company’s website, archived in July 2015, says Wise was then a young grocer with too many potatoes, and that, being a frugal businessman, he used the extra stock to make potato chips. He did the work by hand, the company says, and sold the chips in brown paper bags from his store. English Wikipedia names the business as the Wise Potato Chip Company, says Earl Wise owned a delicatessen, and says he initially cooked the chips in his mother’s kitchen.

The company says the chips found buyers quickly across the eastern United States. Its 2015 history says Wise opened a production plant four years after he began making chips; English Wikipedia gives the year as 1925. The company describes that plant as a concrete building that kept expanding over the next two decades. In 1944, its history says, the plant was destroyed in a fire that halted production, and a new facility was built after eight months and expanded through the rest of the decade.

The name changed as the range widened. The archived company history says that during the 1950s the business grew and began to develop new snacks, and that in 1969 the Wise Potato Chip Co. changed its name to Wise Foods to reflect the wider range. English Wikipedia gives the year of the name change as 1968, and lists popcorn, Cheez Doodles and Bravos tortilla chips among the products sold by then.

Berwick has remained the centre of production. Food Chain magazine, in an interview published on 3 September 2025, described Wise as based in Berwick and said its snacks were primarily produced at its Berwick facility. The chief executive, Milton Mattus, told the magazine that the company had spent the previous four years upgrading the plant, which had been in operation for several decades, and had opened a new warehouse there a couple of years earlier. A decade before, in December 2015, The Shelby Report quoted the then chief executive, Jolie Weber, saying that in recent years Wise had run a single plant, in Berwick, and that a new plant was opening in Fort Worth, Texas, that month.

Borden, private equity and a Mexican bottler.

The Wise family sold the business in the 1960s. The company’s website, answering the question of who owns Wise, says Borden, Inc. acquired Wise in 1964 and expanded its product offerings. English Wikipedia gives the same year and names the buyer as the Borden Condensed Milk Co. In 1989, according to English Wikipedia, Wise acquired Moore’s Quality Snack Foods, a salty-snack maker that sold mostly in Virginia and the Carolinas.

Borden’s era ended in 2000. Food Online reported on 6 September 2000 that PEP Snack Foods, an affiliate of the New York private investment firm Palladium Equity Partners, had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Wise Holdings from BW Holdings. The report described Wise Holdings as a member of the Borden family of companies and listed its manufacturing plants in Berwick and Denver, Pennsylvania, Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Bristol, Virginia. English Wikipedia says Wise closed the Quinlan Pretzel Co. plant in Denver, Pennsylvania, in 2002 and contracted with another company in the area to make pretzels under the Quinlan name.

The present owner arrived in 2012. Baking Business reported on 18 December 2012 that Arca Continental, the Monterrey-based Coca-Cola bottler and producer of Bokados snack foods, had acquired Wise Foods of Berwick from affiliates of Palladium, alongside the Ecuadorian snack maker Inalecsa. The report named the Wise brands at the time as Wise Potato Chips, Ridgies Potato Chips, Cheez Doodles and Dipsy Doodles Corn Chips. Arca Continental has owned Wise since 2012. Its website lists Wise among its food and snack businesses, and the Wise website names Arca Continental as the owner.

The head office has moved more than once. In the December 2015 interview, Weber told The Shelby Report that the company had moved into its Atlanta office in 2013, after a period under private-equity ownership when it ran a virtual office model, and that an earlier chief executive had moved the headquarters from Parsippany, New Jersey, to Atlanta. The company’s own 2015 history page said Wise was still headquartered in Berwick. In 2025 Mattus told Food Chain that Wise had introduced a second brand, Deep River, for kettle chips, and that Arca Continental had operations in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador and Peru.

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.

Peppy the Owl, reduced to a single eye and then brought back.

The Wise identity rests on a pun. English Wikipedia says Earl Wise chose an owl as the company mascot because the bird is reputed to be wise, and that its stylised eye remains the corporate logo. The company’s 2015 history names the bird Peppy the Owl and ties the growth of the 1950s to consumers wanting more chips with the Wise name and Peppy on them.

Peppy’s place in the identity has risen and fallen. In the September 2025 Food Chain interview, Mattus said Peppy dated from the 1950s and quickly became a symbol of Wise, returned in 1980 and later faded from the spotlight. For a long time, he said, the Wise logo featured just Peppy’s eye, which older generations recognised but younger audiences saw simply as an owl. The company was bringing the character back, he said, with a more playful personality reminiscent of an all-American high schooler, to make him relatable to children and families, and retailers and consumers had responded positively.

The owl now stands over a wider range than chips. Under the Wise name, Mattus told the magazine, the company sells popcorn, corn chips, onion rings and a range of dips and sauces alongside its potato chips, while its cheese snacks are sold as Cheez Doodles, a brand he said is particularly well known in the Northeast. He said the company had invested in the quality and brand equity of Cheez Doodles a few years earlier. English Wikipedia lists Dipsy Doodle corn chips and Quinlan pretzels among other Wise products.

The name has also had a stadium stage. English Wikipedia says that in the summer of 2005 Wise agreed a three-year sponsorship deal to become the Official Potato Chip of the New York Mets.

For a design guide, Wise shows how a mascot can be pared down to a single feature — one eye — and carry a brand that way for a long time, then be restored to a full character for a new audience. Compare the guides for Utz and Herr’s. For this guide we use Berwick red, owl brown and chip gold with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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