|
Kettle Foods’ Kettle Chips – boasting
hand-cooked quality and natural flavours – are a familiar
feature of store and supermarket shelves around the
country.
The company was founded in Salem,
Oregon, in 1978. It started by selling cheese and roasted
nuts to natural food stores.
In 1982 Kettle began cooking potatoes
sliced straight into a fryer.
At that time, Kettle Chips produced
the only natural, hand-cooked potato chip in the western
United States.
A six-week European break for the
company’s founder led in 1988 to the establishment of
Kettle Foods Ltd in Norwich to supply European markets.
Contact was made with an English
potato merchant and during a visit to Tuckers, a crisp
company in Norwich, it was noted that part of their
factory was empty.
An agreement was set up with Tuckers
to rent part of their factory and the Kettle Chips cooking
equipment moved in. Sales of Kettle Chips took off in
the UK and after five years at the Tuckers factory,
Kettle Foods Ltd moved to a new, larger site on the
outskirts of the city.
This site, in Bowthorpe, is where
the company is situated today, producing the core range
of potato chips, tortilla chips and organic chips. It
employs about 350 people.
Kettle Foods is currently running
IFS Applications on an IBM Netfinity server based on
the Oracle database.
|
