Utz Brands history

In 1930, the first section of the Utz plant was built on McAlister Street in the rear of Bill & Salie Utz’s home.

In 1936, the Utzes dramatically boosted production by buying an automatic fryer that could produce 300 pounds of chips per hour.

A new manufacturing facility was later built there in 1938, the same year F.X. Rice married one of Bill & Salie’s daughters, Arlene, and joined the Utz business.

Hanover Home Brand was incorporated as Utz Potato Chip Company, Inc in 1947.

After World War II, sales continued to grow, and in 1949 a larger plant was built on ten acres in Hanover.

Lissette, who has five children, hopes new capital will help Utz chip away at its competitors, and he predicts it can become second to $16 billion giant Frito-Lay within a few years. Its market cap is now close to $13 billion, a more than five times increase since it went public in 1959 at $20 a share.

In 1967, Carlisle Street expanded once more, and Utz replaced two original potato cookers with two new 1,200 pound-per hour cookers.

In 1970, Utz Quality Foods purchased Tasty Baking Company, a potato chip facility on nearby Broadway in Hanover.

The firm began making pretzels in 1971 and several years later added popcorn.

In 1975, the High Street plant was opened for an additional 50,000 square feet of production space.

1976: A new, larger plant is built to house most of the company's potato chip production.

In 1978, F.X. Rice retired, and his son Michael took over the job of president, with Arlene Utz Rice serving as board chairman.

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.

Expansion continued in 1982.

Major Expansion Completed in 1983

As demand grew, in 1984, Utz created a mail order department to begin shipping products to Utz fans around the world.

In 1986, production of cheese curls began, to be followed by corn and tortilla chips.

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.

To keep up, by the summer of 1992 Utz was baking pretzels around the clock.

Stacie and Lissette got married in 1994, and a year later Lissette started running Utz’s outlet store and mail-order operation, which had him working the cashier during holidays.

In 1995, Utz welcomed Dylan Lissette, son-in-law of Mike and Jane Rice, into the business, ushering in a fourth generation of the Utz family legacy.

In 1996, the company added a new distribution warehouse, which it would subsequently expand.

The World Distribution Center was built in 1997 at the High Street facility to better handle trailer shipments to national accounts throughout the United States.

Though the Wow! line did not prove as big a hit as anticipated, in large part because of a government-required label warning about potential digestion problems, in 1999 Utz introduced an olestra chip of its own.

In March 2000, Bill and Salie Utz's daughter Arlene Utz Hollinger died.

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.

For 2003, earnings hit an estimated $235 million, up 4 percent from the year before.

In February 2004, Utz acquired the New England distribution rights of Bachman Co., whose products would be distributed with Utz's all the way to Maine.

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In 2010, Utz expanded into Western Ohio, followed by expansion into Atlanta, GA, the next year.

In 2011, Utz celebrated its 90th Anniversary.

Since taking over as CEO in 2013, sales have roughly doubled to $1 billion.

One of the last independent snack brands left, Utz briefly caught the eye of Warren Buffett, an avid fan of the PotatoStix, who told Fortune in 2015 that he once considered making an acquisition offer, though it never materialized.

In 2016, Utz acquired Alabama-based Golden Enterprises, which owns the Golden Flake brand of chips and pork rinds.

Sales hit over $1 billion when Utz acquired some West Coast brands including Hawaiian Snacks and Erin’s from ConAgra at the end of 2019.