The moving story of Fred Baur, the genius buried in a Pringles container

We are in 2008. We are in Cincinnati, Ohio. Larry Bau and his younger brothers go to the funeral home to collect their father’s ashes. They are about to fulfill the last wish of Fred: the execution of what they call “Plan Pringles”.

Before reaching their destination, the Baurs stop at a Walgreens. They enter. Without distractions, they tackle the food aisle. They are looking for fries.

It takes them seconds to find the long Pringles tubes, but they are already there, right in front of their eyes, waiting to be purchased. Discussion time.

“What does it taste like?” asks a Baur. Onion and cream? Barbecue? Larry has no doubts: his father wanted to be buried inside a can of original flavored Pringles.

Anatomy of a Pringles container

What made Fred Baur want to rest forever in a jar of Pringles?

The first Pringles, those of the late 1960s and early 1970s and circulating only in the United States, annoyed the locals a bit. The typical popular refusal of change, of the different.

For a connoisseur like Phil Lempert, creator of supermarketguru.com, the uniform curvature, size and color of these chips did not fit the individualism of the decade. Baur agrees: It took Pringles years to be accepted.

The can in which Fred’s remains lie is made of cardboard and is lined on the inside with aluminum foil. It has a plastic lid that closes perfectly, preventing the entry of air.

Inside, the potatoes, sometimes less than 20, sometimes 25, 80 or 95, lie stacked without danger of breaking. Everything the jar offers is beneficial.

Pringles? winning

Pringles chips – or all Pringles style chips – are a virtuous food: slightly greasy -does not get his hands dirty- difficult to break and a social agreement has been reached that is tasty.

Procter & Gamble (now Kellogs) began creating the monster in 1956 and only sold it for the first time in 1968, Indiana. After some success, in 1975 it was released in the United States.

But it was the eighties when it became popular in the country. All thanks to Brad Pitt. Yes, to Brad Pitt.

In one of his first jobs in the audiovisual industry, the actor, two other guys with whom he shared hegemony and three toned women starred in a psychedelic commercial that shows how Pringles all eat together – in a slip -. They take advantage of the quirky packaging to look at each other and they look very, very much tops.

Due to this publicity, Pringles’ business path did not stop going up, to the point that in 1991 the product began to be sold all over the world and became the snack. cold for excellence. The rest is history.

The realization of a dream

Did Fred Baur create the Pringles container thinking this would be the right place to be buried?

In 1956, Procter & Gamble asked a young chemist to develop a new recipe for snacks that don’t break, aren’t as fat, and don’t have air in the package. Baur took two years to deliver.

Produced in the mouth, the company’s tasters felt that everything was fine except for the taste. Fred’s prototype Pringles lacked taste. Therefore they could not be differentiated from the “Lays style” that reigned at the time. So what happens next.

Enter the field Alessandro Liepa.

In the 1960s, this character reoriented the project by adding to the potatoes already created by Baur a pleasant and recognizable taste. The taste that almost all of us recognize and that few could match.

In this way, thanks to the joint work, The Pringles were born. Liepa was recognized as the creator of the secret formula and Baur as the creator of the packaging and style of the chips, including the particular curved shape of these snacks.

In 1966 Fred patented his creation and in 1971 they made it official. Over the years, Baur graduated as an organic chemist, food preservation scientist, earned a master’s and Ph.D. from Ohio State University, served in the United States Navy as an aviation physiologist, and in the 1980s. , three decades before his death, He asked his children to bury him in a Pringles vase when he died..

“When my dad first raised the idea of ​​burial in a jar in the 1980s, I laughed at it. That day (the funeral) I still remembered it. My brothers and I briefly discussed which flavor to use. to put my father. It was clear to me that we had to use the originals, “Larry Baur said in an article with Time.

On May 4, 2008, shortly after turning ninety, Fred’s dream came true.