The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 20: Fred's Final Wish

Episode Date: June 7, 2016

Why Fred's kids stopped for a snack on the way to his funeral.

This is the way I heard it. After 89 extraordinary years, Fred was dead, and his kids were headed to the funeral home to pay their respects and honor their father's final wish. Along the way, they stopped at a Walgreens to pick up some snacks. After a brief debate concerning the merits of salt and vinegar versus sour cream and onion, the decision was made to go with the original. And so Fred's children resumed their journey to the funeral home armed with potato chips. Fred loved his kids, but his passion was snacks. Many listening now are too young to recall the crisis that very nearly destroyed the junk food industry several decades ago. Broken potato chips.

It's true, people were fed up with bags of chips that had been reduced to thousands of tiny fragments on their way to supermarket shelves. As the outrage grew, industry leaders began to panic. Something had to be done. So in 1966, Proctor and Gamble called in Fred. Fred held a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and a natural fascination with all things edible. He had designed freeze-dried ice cream and a vast variety of frying oils used in just about every kind of mass-produced food. If anyone could figure out how to keep potato chips in one piece, it was Fred. But after some careful thought and rudimentary prototypes, Fred realized that a better

container would first require a better chip. What was needed was more uniformity, something that could be packed more efficiently and thereby shipped with less collateral damage. After two years of painstaking experimentation, Fred found the winning design, a hyperbolic paraboloid. Basically, Fred took dried potato flakes, added a bunch of unpronounceable ingredients, fried them up and sliced him into thin saddle-shaped chips. In this way, Fred found he could stack a generous number of chips into a single column, which fit neatly into his vacuum-sealed tube, thereby allowing the contents to remain fresh indefinitely and arrive at their final destination unbroken.

Procter & Gamble was thrilled with the new package. Customers were delighted with the new design. There was just one problem. The chips themselves tasted like sawdust. After a few more years of tweaking and testing, the flavor finally improved, and Fred's newfangled chips were finally rolled out nationally. But then, the lawyers came out of the woodwork, claiming that Fred's potato chips couldn't be called potato chips because they only contain 42% potato.

They had a point. And so, after much haggling and compromise, the conspicuous lack of vegetable content led to a new terminology where in Fred's chips. would be marketed as crisps. Point is, Fred had a front-row seat to the birth of a truly iconic brand. He was there from the very start, nurturing a completely new idea through the endless pitfalls and breakthroughs of product development. He was there when the shareholders called for Procter & Gamble to dump Fred's chips

because they were such an obvious failure. And he was there to see the brand break $100 million. and sales, then 200 million, then 500 million. But he wasn't there in 2011, when Procter and Gamble finally sold his chips for nearly two and a half billion dollars. Fred died in 2008, which brings us back to the funeral home where Fred's children had now arrived with a can of Fred's chips prepared to honor their father's final wish. You know by now the chips in question are, you know by now the chips in Pringles. And from what I've told you about Fred Bauer, I doubt you'd be surprised to learn he wanted his loved ones to enjoy a can during his cremation. And so they did. You might be surprised, though,

to learn that Fred's children honored their dad's last wish by putting Fred's ashes into the empty can of Pringles, which is precisely where Fred resides to this day, neatly packaged, and vacuum-packed for all eternity. In life, Fred Bauer poured himself into his work. In death, his kids did the honors, proving once again the inherent truth of Pringle's now famous slogan, once you pop, the fun don't stop. Anyway, that's the way I heard it. If you're a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility and your machinery isn't working right, Granger knows you need to understand what's wrong as soon as possible. So when a conveyor motor falters, Granger offers diage. diagnostic tools like calibration kits and multimeters to help you identify and fix the problem.

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