A Texas engineer, the 1980s oil bust and a former car dealership.

Zapp’s is a brand of kettle-cooked potato chips from Gramercy, Louisiana. It carries the name of its founder, Ron Zappe, and it has been owned by the Pennsylvania snack maker Utz since 2011. Its flavour names lean on Louisiana: Cajun Crawtators, Cajun Dill Gator-Tators and Voodoo.

Zappe came to chips from the oilfield. The Baton Rouge newspaper The Advocate reported on 1 June 2010 that he was a transplant from Texas who had lost his oilfield services companies in the oil bust of the 1980s. The Baton Rouge station WBRZ reported the same day that he had run four petroleum service companies that went bankrupt, and that he moved from Houston to Baton Rouge. The brand’s own history, on the Zapp’s website in 2024, says he studied industrial engineering at Texas A&M University and that his businesses had distributed pumps and other oilfield equipment.

The idea, the company says, came from his wife, Anne, who bought a bag of Texas-made kettle-fried chips at the grocery store; he decided to make a similar chip in Louisiana. The company’s account quotes his obituary in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, in which he recalled that she thought he had gone mad, and he told her it was chips, not nuts. Money was hard to find. The Advocate said his venture was turned away by bank after bank before a lender agreed, and that his lesson to student and business groups was never to give up.

The premises were unusual. Both The Advocate and WBRZ said Zappe bought the empty former Faucheux Chevrolet dealership in Gramercy and started making chips there. The Zapp’s site quotes Zappe telling Oprah Winfrey’s show in 1997, as reported by the Times-Picayune, that the company made chips on the showroom floor and that teenagers would park outside to watch. The Advocate used a nickname for the business in January 2011: “The Little Chippery in Gramercy”.

A Quayle rally, a founder’s death and a Pennsylvania buyer.

The chip itself was set from the start. The Advocate and WBRZ said Zappe experimented with and perfected a thicker-cut, kettle-fried potato chip cooked in high-grade peanut oil. Both reports dated his favourite flavour, Cajun Crawtators, to 1985, and the L’Observateur of LaPlace said in January 2011 that Zappe Endeavors had been founded in Gramercy that year.

The founder became part of the story. The Los Angeles Times reported on 1 September 1988 that at a campaign rally at Louisiana State University’s basketball arena in Baton Rouge, Zappe took the stage for the Republican vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle. He credited a job training programme co-written by Quayle with helping his company hire and train unskilled workers, and the paper quoted his line that the Good Lord gave him the faith, the bank loaned him the money and Dan Quayle gave him the job training partnership.

Zapp’s grew beyond Louisiana by buying other chips. The Advocate, as republished by the trade site PotatoPro on 7 January 2011, said the company acquired the Dirty potato chip line in the mid-1990s and factories in California and Pennsylvania in the following decade. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported the same month that its plants in Louisiana, Pennsylvania and California made chips under the Zapp’s, Dirty and California Chips labels.

The Advocate and WBRZ reported on 1 June 2010 that Ron Zappe had died in Houston that day. His longtime general manager, Rod Olson, became president, The Advocate said. Seven months later the company agreed to a sale. The Associated Press, in a report carried by NOLA.com on 7 January 2011, said Zappe Endeavors LLC had agreed to be acquired by Utz Quality Foods of Hanover, Pennsylvania, and that Olson expected the deal to close in the first quarter. The Inquirer said the two family-owned companies had signed a letter of intent. Olson told L’Observateur that Zapp’s was “sticking around and will have a presence in Gramercy”, and described it as a premium brand of kettle chip.

The law firm Cozen O’Connor, which acted for Utz, says the purchase was completed in April 2011, bringing Utz the plants in Louisiana, California and Pennsylvania along with the Dirty and Zapp’s brands. Utz has owned Zapp’s since then.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are American sweets and regional potato chips: boxed chocolates, jelly beans, cinnamon candies, marshmallow shapes and chips sold mainly in the cities where they began. Brands of this kind sit at very different points in the trade, from family companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that have passed through several owners, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket aisle.

A candy or chip brand’s identity is usually carried less by one product than by a box, a bag, a seasonal pack and a name, because the company behind it may have changed hands, moved its production or grown well beyond the place where it started. Candy boxes and holiday packs return each year with familiar colours, while a regional chip bag often leans on the city it comes from. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where it is 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.

Bright bags, Cajun word-play, a hotline and a New Orleans voice under a Pennsylvania owner.

Zapp’s built its identity on language as much as on graphics. Its flavour names draw on Louisiana word-play, from Cajun Crawtators to Gator-Tators. L’Observateur listed Cajun Crawtator, Mesquite BBQ, Cajun Dill, Hotter ’n Hot Jalapeño and a Creole Tomato spiked with Tabasco among the flavours that made the company’s name. In 2024 the brand’s own shop led with Voodoo, Evil Eye and Voodoo Heat alongside the older Crawtators and Gator-Tators.

Sports and the city came into the range as well. The Advocate and WBRZ both named Tiger Tators, licensed by LSU, and “Who Dat?” chips; The Advocate said Zapp’s sold the “Who Dat?” chips years before the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl. The Advocate said in 2010 that the brightly coloured packs had quickly become a favourite across the Gulf Coast.

Zappe also sold the brand in person. The Zapp’s site says, citing the Times-Picayune, that Zappe stood at busy intersections handing out free samples, and that his personality earned coverage in The Wall Street Journal and People; The Advocate and WBRZ also named those two publications and his appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s show in 1997. The site adds that he set up a 1-800-HOT-CHIP telephone line for orders.

The Zapp’s website, carrying a 2022 Utz Quality Foods copyright, called the range “Daringly Different Flavors with a Unique New Orleans Style”, invited buyers to let the good times roll and promised chips “Kettle cooked, one batch at a time since 1985”. Its story page carried the heading “From Crude Oil to Peanut Oil”.

For a design guide, Zapp’s shows how a regional chip can build its name on its home ground: the founder’s story, the peanut oil and the Louisiana flavour names, kept after a sale to a Pennsylvania owner. Compare it with Zatarain’s, another Louisiana food brand that carries New Orleans on its packs, and Kettle Chips, a kettle-cooked chip from Oregon. For this guide we use cayenne red, kettle gold, bayou green and paper bag cream with a blocky sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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