Tater to chip is a quick trip

And if you think Cape Cod's 80,000 bags of chips a day is a lot, think again. Frito-Lay's factories turn out 13 million bags of Lay's potato chips every day. That's 3.9 trillion bags a year!

Cape Cod's workers aren't allowed to eat any chips at the factory, but everyone gets a box of potato chips every three months. Each box contains 16 bags. That's one bag of chips a week, with some left over. They even get some extra snack-size bags at Halloween (for trick-or-treaters), and samples of any new flavor.

And even after spending all day making potato chips, workers still enjoy them.

Geraldo Goncalves has worked here for 11 years . "I still eat them [at home] with a sandwich" he says, and he shares his chips with his three sons.

Do you like barbecue or pizza-flavored potato chips? How about chicken curry, steak and onion, or garlic-flavored ones?

People in different parts of the world enjoy very different flavors of potato chips. Jeremy Selwyn tries to taste as many strangely flavored chips as he can.

Mr. Selwyn is Chief Snacks Officer at taquitos.net. He has tried about 400 different chips, ranging from sour-cream-and-clam flavored chips in Maine to shish-kebab flavored ones in Egypt. "Everybody eats potato chips," Selwyn says.

Potato chips were invented in the United States in the 1850s. They were first introduced outside the US in 1921, when they arrived in England. There they were called "crisps," because "chip" was already reserved for what Americans call French fries.

Today, children abroad may sample chips with such flavors as chicken-and-tomato (Poland), seaweed (Taiwan), and sweet-basil-and-fried-pork (Thailand). A British company even makes roast-beef-and- mustard "crisps." Paprika chips are popular in Switzerland.

Flavors also vary within the United States according to region. Ketchup chips can mainly be found in the Northeast near the Canadian border, while jalapeno pepper-flavored ones are popular in the Southwest.

Potato chips aren't everyone's favorite snack around the world. Children in Greece, for example, prefer pistachio nuts. Crackers outsell potato chips in Canada. Kids in Finland like popcorn better.

And in Latin America and the Caribbean, yucca, a stringy root vegetable, is the preferred item to be turned into chips, Selwyn says.

Potato chips used to be served only at dinner and only in restaurants. It wasn't until 1895 that you could finally buy them in stores.

That year, William Tappendon in Cleveland, Ohio, started making potato chips in his kitchen. He later converted a barn behind his house into a potato-chip factory. Today, Tappendon is much less well-known than other potato-chip pioneers.

Take Earl Wise, who found he had too many potatoes at his grocery in the 1920s. He began selling chips in brown-paper bags. At the same time, Salie Utz started making chips in Hanover, Pa. Herman Lay, a traveling salesman, helped popularize chips in the American South in the 1920s. He sold them out of the trunk of his car.

You can still find Wise, Utz, and Lay's potato chips in stores.

Pringles were named after Pringle Street in Finneytown, Ohio. Ruffles, the first ridged potato chip sold nationally, weren't named after anything in particular when they made their debut in 1958.

Until 1926, potato chips in stores were kept in cracker barrels or special glass display cases. Customers took them home in paper bags.

Then Laura Scudder, who owned a small chip shop in California, had an idea. She gave her employees sheets of wax paper. At night, they ironed the wax paper into bags to fill with chips the next day. Finally, customers could take home bags of chips that stayed fresh.

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