Better Made in Michigan: The Salty Story of Detroit's Best Chip

Prologue

Oil, Salt and Potatoes

Potato chips—those salty, golden morsels that are the definition of American ingenuity—are a deceptively simple snack food.

The average potato chip bag lists three ingredients: oil, salt and potatoes. That humble tuber mixed with a handful of spice and fried at the right temperature becomes something akin to magic. They not only fill people’s bellies but also put a smile on their collective faces.

For Detroit and many cities like it, potato chips provided that and so much more: jobs, name recognition and a taste that came to define home. With just three ingredients, home-based potato chip manufacturers sprang up across Detroit in the 1920s. These early chippers created a cottage industry in a bustling metropolis with a reputation for fast cars and hungry entrepreneurs.

The humble goal of earning a little pocket money expanded in the 1930s. A few dozen companies grew into commercial kitchens, where the owner’s friends, neighbors and, in many cases, Detroit’s increasing immigrant population worked with dexterity to fill bags with chips and staple them shut. Door-to-door hustle combined with stands in hot spots like Belle Isle also fed these fledging businesses.

By the 1940s, small kettle-cooked batches had given way to industrial fryers. Paper or wax bags were replaced with foil-lined versions that were machine sealed. The days of carrying bags of potatoes in from the truck waned as conveyor belts replaced young muscle. Women of all ages—whether they were high school graduates, single mothers or widows—worked the factory floor and in a growing number of storefronts. Men took care of the frying, worked in the warehouses and delivered the finished product to the neighborhood grocers, druggists and convenience stores across the city.

A few companies transformed again into factories whose busy production lines defined the Nifty Fifties, giving livelihoods to those men and women who needed jobs after World War II. A handful of businesses had exploded into conglomerates by the swinging ’60s, establishing brands whose manufacturing might and deep distribution channels allowed them to gain dominance over the state’s snack food industry.

As the decades passed, many beloved household names would go from family businesses to corporate ownership. By the 1980s, mergers, the race toward automation and competition for shelf space had driven most Detroit chippers out of existence. Their only legacy was rusted tins inside the family attic or faded advertisements painted on silos along Michigan’s blue highways.

The longest-lasting company to survive those ups, downs and everything in between is Better Made Snack Foods. Its plant on Detroit’s Gratiot Avenue is a landmark in this hard-luck city. People of all ages recognize its logo, which features a friendly young maid whose product is Guest Quality—that is, fine enough to serve anyone who might grace your doorstep.

Two distant cousins—Pete Cipriano and Cross Moceri—started Better Made with a single truck and a few hundred dollars in cash. They had a mutual devotion to excellence, personally supervising production to ensure that chips were crispy, delicate and perfect. With its impeccably fried products, Better Made set the standard among other companies. Everyone judged their chips by Better Made’s color, its freshness and, most importantly, its taste.

The fact that Better Made endured from its incorporation in 1930 to today is a bit of a miracle in and of itself. Better Made fought a plethora of challenges from national potato chip companies to fickle consumers to Detroit’s population woes. Its owners clashed on key aspects of the business, creating such heated debates that Cipriano would walk out of the room if Moceri came in and vice versa. When the two families finally separated through a buyout in 2003, there was a moment when it looked like the company might have reached its end.

Yet Better Made persevered. Its continued success is a testament to family pride, employee loyalty, community support and thousands of hungry fans who go out of their way to pass by rack after rack of other brands to grab that red-and-yellow bag.

Three ingredients. Salt from a Michigan mine. Cottonseed oil from American manufacturers. And locally grown potatoes for as long as the ground produces them. Those three things are found in every Better Made potato chip.

So simple and yet so complicated. And so, so Detroit.

Chapter 1

Potato Peddlers

What small potatoes we all are compared with what we might be!

–Charles Dudley Warner

In modern-day Detroit, the sprawling façade of the Better Made Snack Food plant serves as a focal point along Gratiot Avenue. It stands out among the churches, gas stations and neighboring houses for a variety of reasons. It is the only manufacturing facility of any kind for miles. After more than a dozen expansions, the factory takes up an entire city block from Gratiot to French Road. There is the red-and-blue Better Made Quality sign that stands guard at the building’s front. There are its large glass windows, which give a glimpse of the sizable production lines and freshly fried chips inside. Then there is the dramatic sight of a semi-truck trailer on a hydraulic lift as it is tipped to deliver a load of forty-five thousand to eighty-five thousand pounds of potatoes.

Inside, something amazing is about to happen. In about seven minutes, those potatoes will go from a raw tuber, still coated with the earth in which it grew, to a Better Made potato chip. From that truck, potatoes pour in through a small window to the facility. They are bounced along a conveyor belt to bright-blue storage bins. This is the area where it pays to linger; the odor of soil and fresh potatoes is so strong that you will smell it long after you have left the factory. It is the kind of scent memory that moves you, reminding you of this nation’s farming heritage and the goodness of eating something fresh from the ground.

Those potatoes selected are transported to a machine that washes the spuds to remove any field dirt or contaminants. A machine peels the outer layer off in seconds. From there, another machine slices them to a precise width. Once a Better Made employee inspects the potatoes to remove any of poor quality and ensure that they are of uniform size, they are off to a temperature-controlled cooker. They are fried in oil for about three to four minutes. A machine salts the chips while they are still hot and moist. Any flavoring, such as the seasoning for the legendary barbecue flavor, comes next. The finished product moves along an overhead vibrating conveyor system to automatic packing machines that weigh, fill and seal the bags. Workers put the bags inside cartons, which are taped shut and moved to the Better Made warehouse for distribution to grocery stores, convenience markets and other outlets across Michigan and a handful of other states.

Some 60 million pounds of potatoes go through the plant annually, producing an impressive amount of potato chips. But that’s not all Better Made does. In fact, President Mark Winkelman describes the company as a snack food distributor that makes potato chips for good reason. Besides manufacturing chips, potato sticks and popcorn on site, Better Made creates private-label products for retailers and distributes a variety of snack foods with its labeling to stores regionally. There’s corn pops, party mix, cheddar fries, cheese curls, corn chips, tortilla chips, pork rinds, cracklins, salsas, dips, rubs, licorice, beef jerky, nuts and more, all finding their way to store shelves because of Better Made’s distribution prowess. It is what diversifies the company, Winkelman said, keeping it profitable beyond Detroit’s sizable and notable chip obsession.

It is, without a doubt, a far different company than the one that started in the 1920s in the kitchens of Cross Moceri and Pete Cipriano. For them, the potato chip business was something they did in the cool evening hours and peddled door to door in small batches. Among their earliest customers were families picnicking in Detroit’s many parks on the weekends or travelers on one of the city’s streetcars during their busy daily commute. Better Made’s start was so inauspicious that level-headed Cipriano remained a milkman for many years after its creation. Family lore has it that he finally gave up his route around 1941 to keep an eye on his investment in the company, which Moceri had grown into a storefront along East Forest Avenue and then into a larger kitchen along McDougall. A short-lived stay on Woodward Avenue—where the nearby secretarial pools troubled by the smell of frying potatoes would force Better Made to work only at night—would take the company to its current Gratiot Avenue location by 1949.

Pietro Pete Cipriano was one of nine children. A 1913 family portrait features six of the siblings along with Pete’s beloved father and mother, Isadore and Catherine. Cipriano family collection.

The best way to understand the powerful legacy of Better Made and that of Detroit’s chipreneurs is to look back at the city’s development, its entrepreneurial landscape and the families who created these companies. Over the twentieth century, there is evidence that there were about forty potato chip businesses of various sizes selling potato chips in the Motor City. Most started as and remained home-based chippers, selling batches of what really were kettle-style chips. A dozen or so would become household names, including brands such as Everkrisp, Krun-Chee, Superior, Mello Krisp and Wolverine. Less than a handful developed into well-organized businesses that became regional or national players. The most notable example is New Era, the brainchild of Ernest L. Nicolay and Russell V. Dancey, two autoworkers turned potato chip titans.

Many of these chip companies, including Better Made, were started by immigrants eager for work and looking to create jobs for other newcomers from their homeland to Detroit. In the case of New Era, it was a business that grew out of the ambition of a farmer’s son who wanted success that did not depend on Mother Nature. These were men who saw a city with immense hunger, literally and figuratively. In Detroit, they could grow alongside the population, the city’s towering skyscrapers and its powerful automotive manufacturers. They could take their first years of struggle, harsh working conditions and desperation and channel them into their own enterprises, many of which created fortunes that have lasted well into the second and third generations.

So where did the idea for these delicious treats start? Theories vary, but researchers have found recipes for potato chips in cookbooks from the early nineteenth century. Most potato chip historians say that the salty snack as most people know it was invented in about 1853, when Chef George Crum worked at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York. That tale centers on Crum dropping a thinly shaved potato in the fryer to serve to a finicky customer who had returned their potatoes for being too thick. Another version has Crum’s sister, Katie, inventing what is known as a potato chip when she accidentally dropped a potato slice in the kitchen’s fryer. In recent years, however, a small group of folklore historians who have studied the story have noted that a secondary chef known as Eliza was the likely inventor. She was known for crisping potatoes, building a potato-frying reputation in Saratoga around the late 1840s. Eliza Loomis, who owned the Lake House, is the likely culprit. Loomis worked in the kitchen, as most managers would have, and there are various newspaper articles that report customers enjoying crispy potato slices there years before Crum arrived. By one account, the Lake House had built such a reputation