Austin Quality Foods history

In 1976, the company built a third plant in Hanover, which boosted potato chip production to 7,000 pounds per hour.

In 1980, the firm broke ground on its largest building project to date, the expansion of its newest plant into one of the most modern snack food manufacturing facilities in the United States.

In 1983, the company also bought equipment to produce a new line of "hand-cooked" potato chips, whose crunchier texture and stronger taste had begun to find favor with the public.

With annual sales growth averaging 13 percent, by 1989 the firm's output had increased to 500,000 pounds of chips per week.

Utz was now seeing a dramatic increase in pretzel sales, which by 1991 had come to comprise nearly 10 percent of total revenues, following several years of growth by 20 percent annually.

She had served as board chairman until 1992.

Beginning in 1996, Frito-Lay had begun marketing potato chips fried in Procter & Gamble's olestra, an oil that was not absorbed by the body and thus resulted in a lower calorie count.

In January 1998, Utz sued the University of Maryland after that institution barred its products from campus and removed its advertising signs from sports arenas.

The firm got a promotional boost in January 2001 when popular NASCAR driver Rusty Wallace began sporting the Utz logo on his car and uniform.

Moving to further increase sales in the New York metro area, in 2002 the firm hired Dircks Associates to design outdoor advertising that would be placed on 200 billboards in the city's five boroughs.

In the summer of 2003, Utz was named the "Official Salty Snack" of the Philadelphia Eagles football team, and the firm introduced a special one-pound bag of chips bearing the Eagles' logo.