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By jflanagan
#4866
Why are a majority of chips in your average bag broken or merely crumbs? Because the chips rest on a hard surface rendering your chips unedible.

Why not have a pocket of air at the bottom of the bag that acts like a cushion for the chips to rest on. Now when you open a bag of chips, you can enjoy a full bag as opposed to the usual 25% of the chips being reduced to crumbs.
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By Michael D. Grissom
#4929
All chip bags are sealed -- broken chips come from rough handling by carriers and idiots who shake and squeeze the bags (like they do vegetables) to find the best one. Probably the best bet is to put a sealed bag of chips within another sealed bag OR buy the new type of identically shaped and serially stacked chips in a can (think they're called Pringles). A bubble on the bottom won't help when the guy slams them one after the other against each other onto the store shelves. Their job duties specify "quick" not "careful". I think this is why they invented "Ruffles with Ridges" the wavy chip -- much harder to break and crunchier!

:-b
By Rishi
#4942
MDG,
You are right. One of the companies in the group I work for is in the snack food business. The fried product is packed in Nitrogen filled bags to prevent the fat from becoming rancid. Unfortunately this does nothing to reduce breaking caused by handling.

We tried adding FDA apporoved edible plant fibres to reinforce the product. This significantly reduced the breakage, but altered the mouthfeel. The snack was less light and crunchy. Customers did not want them.

Rishi
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By Michael D. Grissom
#5052
Just a thought Rishi but next time anyone in your group flies off to a third world country where nobody's ever tasted a "chip" before -- see how they like the fiber reinforced chips (control group experiment). I would then be curious to know if after they ate them for a long while, would they then reject regular chips because the "mouth-feel" wasn't right. Who knows, these people might have been chewing on twigs and bamboo shoots for thousands of years and might think that your fiber chips are straight out of heaven!!!
;-D

I ran into a similar marketing problem with my "no cork screw PopCork" that I posted as a topic on this site. The two major world cork manufacturers watched the demo and politely said that they see NO REASON to leave the centuries old industry standard corks. But then!!! -- a full year after we had given up on the project, right out of the blue a company in europe saw my posting here in the CP, contacted us with info on a huge market that our marketing team did NOT perceive and, bingo!!! -- we're starting negotiations. How cool is that!!!
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