1954, and a flavour borrowed from lunch
Walkers introduced Cheese and Onion in 1954, with the flavour tied to the idea of the ploughman's lunch. That is worth pausing on, because it explains why this tastes so specifically British rather than simply cheesy. It came from a real plate of food: cheese, onion, bread, and the sort of pub lunch that never pretended to be complicated. The pattern carried on from there. Salt and Vinegar arrived in 1967, drawing on the national habit of putting vinegar on chips. Prawn Cocktail followed in the 1970s, when the dinner-party starter was having its moment, and Roast Chicken took its cue from the British roast dinner. Walkers did not invent its flavours out of nothing. It went round the country's kitchens and took notes.
Why a butcher started slicing potatoes
The company itself started in Leicester, and not with potatoes. The Walker family had been connected with a butcher's business in the city since the 1880s, after Henry James Walker moved from Mansfield to take over a shop in the High Street. Walkers as a crisp business was founded in Leicester in 1948 by Henry Walker, and the reason was practical rather than visionary. Post-war meat rationing made life difficult for a meat business, so managing director R.E. Gerrard steered the firm towards potato crisps instead. The earliest bags were hand-sliced, fried, sprinkled with salt and sold for threepence. There is something reassuringly unglamorous about that. The country was short of meat, so a butcher started slicing potatoes.
The boardroom bit, kept short
The Walker family sold the business in 1970 to Standard Brands, which later merged with Nabisco to form Nabisco Brands in 1981, and PepsiCo has owned Walkers since 1989. PepsiCo, the company behind Frito-Lay, uses Walkers as the regional equivalent of Lay's, which is why the two can look like relatives while British shoppers stay completely certain about which one they actually want. Leicester stayed central through all of it, and the Leicester production base became one of the most significant crisp-making sites in Britain. The brand picked up another Leicester face along the way in Gary Lineker, the former England footballer, who has fronted Walkers adverts since the mid-1990s. Foil packaging came in from 1993 and nitrogen filling from 1996 to help keep bags fresh, which is also a fair explanation for why a bag this size arrives looking more confident than its contents strictly justify.
Where the big bag sits in the family
There is no supplied origin record for the 150g sharing bag itself, so the honest story here is the brand and the flavour behind it rather than a neat invention tale about this exact size of packet. What can be said is that it is the same Walkers cheese and onion, in the format British shelves settled on for evenings rather than lunchboxes. Walkers also sits at the head of a fairly untidy snack family, with names including Quavers, Wotsits and Monster Munch under the same banner, and Smiths kept on as a sub-brand covering things like Chipsticks, Frazzles and Bacon Fries. Next to all of that, the big blue bag is the plain one, which is exactly why it tends to be opened first.
Why it travels well
For British shoppers in Canada, cheese and onion is one of those flavours that gets missed by name rather than by category. Not crisps in general, not something almost right in a similar coloured bag. This one. It belongs to corner shops, newsagent shelves, packed lunches opened slightly too early, and grandparents' cupboards where the good things were kept just out of reach. A 150g bag makes a decent job of carrying all that across an ocean, and it is big enough to survive being offered round at least once. The Great British Shop is glad to keep them within reach, on the clear understanding that nobody here believes the sharing part either.
