Salt came first, and salt was the whole idea
There is no separate origin record here for Ready Salted as a named product, so this will not be a neat tale about the afternoon someone invented the plain bag. The honest story is the brand's, and in this case that is the better one anyway. The first Walkers crisps, in 1948, were hand-sliced, fried, sprinkled with salt and sold for threepence a bag. No flavour name, no seasoning to explain, no reference to another meal. Salted crisps were not one option within the range. They were the range. Everything Walkers has argued about on a packet since then was built on top of that.
From a Leicester butcher's shop to a sack of potatoes
Walkers was founded in Leicester in 1948 by Henry Walker, though the family had been in food in that city for a long time before crisps came into it. Henry James Walker moved from Mansfield to Leicester in the 1880s to take over a butcher's shop in the High Street, and for decades the business was meat. The turn to potatoes came after the Second World War, when rationing made a meat business very hard going, and the managing director, R.E. Gerrard, steered the company towards crisps instead. It is not a grand founding vision. It is a butcher's shop looking at what was actually available and deciding a hot pan and a sack of potatoes would do. Ready Salted is the direct descendant of that decision, which may be why it has never felt any need to dress up.
The flavours arrived, and the plain bag stayed put
Walkers spent the following decades turning recognisable British meals into seasoning. Cheese and Onion came in 1954, borrowing from the ploughman's lunch. Salt and Vinegar followed in 1967, taking its cue from the national habit of putting vinegar on chips. Prawn Cocktail arrived in the 1970s, when the starter served in a stemmed glass was having its moment, and Roast Chicken leaned on the Sunday roast. Each one is a small act of translation. Ready Salted stands through the whole parade doing none of that, because it does not have to. The salt-your-own instinct runs deep in British crisps, mind you. Smith's Potato Crisps, founded in 1920 by Frank Smith and Jim Viney, sold crisps in greaseproof paper bags with a twist of salt so people could season them themselves. Smiths survives today as a sub-brand of Walkers, covering names like Chipsticks, Frazzles, Bacon Fries and Scampi Fries, so both halves of that argument now live under the same roof.
A large company, a small bag, and a Canadian cupboard
The corporate part deserves one paragraph and not a word more. The Walker family sold the business in 1970 to Standard Brands, which merged with Nabisco to form Nabisco Brands in 1981, and Walkers has been owned by PepsiCo, the company behind Frito-Lay, since 1989. That is why Walkers is sometimes described as the British counterpart to Lay's, and why the name on the front of the bag stayed the one people already knew. Leicester stayed central through all of it, and Gary Lineker has fronted the adverts since the mid-1990s, so a whole generation cannot look at the logo without bracing for a pun. The packet, meanwhile, keeps making the same modest point it always did. This one says 100% Great British Potatoes on the front, which for a British shopper in Halifax, Calgary or wherever the parcel lands is doing rather more emotional work than six small bags of salted crisps ought to manage. Ready Salted is what goes beside a sandwich when the sandwich is fine but the day has not been. The Great British Shop is happy to keep some in.
