Two trade groups, the Snack Food Association (now SNAC International) and the National Potato Promotion Board (now Potatoes USA), created National Snack Food Month in 1989 to lift sales during a slow February. They tied it to the one February event that already moved snacks: the Super Bowl.
CHAPTER 01
How America became a nation of snackers
The Smithsonian traces the shift to the second half of the twentieth century. Between roughly 1950 and 2000, packaged snacks engineered for salt, sugar, and fat became cheap and everywhere. By the 1980s, people were eating them at home, at work, in the car, and at their desks.
The salty corner of that business had a clear starting point. In 1932, a San Antonio man named C.E. Doolin bought a corn-chip recipe and a small press from a fellow named Gustavo Olguin. The product was Fritos. By 1950, assembly-line production had carried them across the country.
