About
One summer in 1853...
Cornelius Vanderbilt was lunching at his favorite Adirondacks resort, when he complained that his side of french fried potatoes (cooked in beef tallow in that pre-seed oil golden age) were too thick.
After Vanderbilt returned the meal twice in a row, legendary chef George Crum mockingly sent back a few thin slivers of potato, fried to a crisp. Once his patrician temper had cooled, ‘the Commodore’ succumbed to curiosity, tasted one of the crispy, decadent slices, and was amazed…
The potato chip was born.
Or so the story goes. Regardless, the chip swept all across New England that summer, gracing country clubs and summer houses up and down the coast.
The humble potato had been elevated to a decadent finger food – a confident, rising young country’s answer to its bloated European cousin, the Belgian ‘french’ fry.
Like all perfect things, the potato chip was simple and impossible to improve upon. Just fresh, thin-sliced potatoes, fried to a golden crisp in beef tallow. Americans and their children crunched away with abandon, unconcerned about health effects or gaining weight.
So what happened since?
“Big Food” happened…
As potato chips became mass-produced, food companies began to cut corners, using cheaper, unnatural ingredients.
Why use costly tallow and organic potatoes when you could fry pesticide sprayed potatoes in cheap, industrial seed oil, and consumers would be none the wiser?
Store-bought chips are now a major source of inflammatory seed oils in the American diet: their large fry-able surface area means they are completely soaked in the stuff.
Why not go back?
As seed-oil free chip appreciators, we decided to revive this great American snack and – for the first time in decades – make potato chips exactly as they used to be made.
And thus, Vandy Crisps were born:
Just three high quality, delicious ingredients: naturally grown potatoes (free of CIPC), grass fed and finished beef tallow, and unrefined sea salt
Hand-fried into a golden crisp in our tallow snack factory and shipped right to your door.
No seed oils, pesticides or artificial ingredients ever – a crunch worthy of a Vanderbilt.