Route 11 Potato Chips received a “Best in Virginia Award” on November 1 for their new ‘salt and pepper’ flavored potato chips. They’ve been working on perfecting the flavor for around 12 years after trying many different recipes.
They say most salt and pepper chips have 12 or 13 ingredients, but they wanted to find the perfect salt with the right flavor to use as few ingredients as possible. After trying a special salt from a brine well in West Virginia, they knew they’d found what they were looking for. The only ingredients in the chips are potatoes, oil, salt and pepper.
Sarah Cohen, President of Route 11 Potato Chips President:
“It’s very unique, and just we had one of those ah-ha moments and it was like, we tried that salt, and put a little pepper on it, and it was perfect!”
The company tried releasing the flavor in July, but ran into a big problem.
Sarah Cohen:
“We were getting very excited about launching this, and we ran out of potatoes for two weeks.”
. Route 11 Potato Chips had been buying potatoes from North Carolina, but after the severe flooding they faced, they could not get a single potato for two weeks. It was the first time in 25 years this ever happened.
Sarah Cohen:
“We usually have thousands of cases of chips in inventory that are going out — we were down to about 10 cases of potato chips. So our warehouse was pretty much empty.”
This set back the release of the salt and pepper chips for a while, but they’re slowly starting to appear on store shelves now.
Cohen says you should start seeing the chips pop up in stores over the next month.
