The Inventor of Pringles Is Buried in a Pringles Can

Quick Answer

Fredric J. Baur, the organic chemist and food storage technician who designed the Pringles can and the distinctive saddle-shaped chip, was so proud of his invention that he asked his family to bury part of his cremated remains in a Pringles can. When Baur died in 2008 at age 89, his children honored the request. Part of his ashes were placed in a Pringles can (original flavor) and buried alongside a traditional urn containing the rest.

The Man Behind the Can

Fredric Baur was not a celebrity inventor or a household name. He was a quiet, methodical organic chemist who spent most of his career at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio. His contribution to snack food history was not the chip itself but the packaging and shape — two innovations that solved a genuine problem.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the potato chip industry had a frustration that consumers knew all too well: chips arrived broken. Traditional potato chips are irregular in shape, fragile, and packed in bags with a lot of air. By the time a bag went from factory to store shelf to kitchen, a significant percentage of the chips were fragments and crumbs. The bag also went stale quickly once opened, and the chips at the bottom were always pulverized by the weight of those above.

Baur set out to solve this with an engineering approach. Rather than trying to make irregular chips more durable, he redesigned the chip entirely.

The Hyperbolic Paraboloid

The shape Baur created for what would become Pringles is a hyperbolic paraboloid — a saddle-shaped surface that curves upward in one direction and downward in the perpendicular direction. This is a mathematically precise geometric form, and Baur chose it for practical reasons.

A hyperbolic paraboloid is inherently stackable. The uniform shape allows chips to nest together in a compact column, each one sitting snugly against the one below it. This stacking eliminates the air gaps and random orientation that cause breakage in bags of irregular chips.

The shape also distributes stress evenly. When pressure is applied to the center of a flat chip, it snaps. When pressure is applied to the center of a saddle-shaped chip, the curves redirect the force to the edges, making the chip significantly more resistant to breaking.

Baur designed the cylindrical can to hold this stack of uniformly shaped chips in a protected column. The can could be sealed to keep the contents fresh (a major advantage over bags, which let in air and moisture) and could be shipped and stacked without the chips inside being crushed.

The result was a chip-and-container system that solved every major problem in the potato chip industry: breakage, staleness, inefficient packaging, and inconsistent portions. It was a design triumph, and Baur knew it. He was proud of the Pringles can for the rest of his life — proud enough to want to be part of it, literally, after death.

The Burial

Fredric Baur died on May 4, 2008, in Cincinnati. He had told his family years earlier that he wanted to be buried in a Pringles can. According to his eldest son, Larry, the family was initially uncertain about the request but came to see it as entirely in character.

The decision of which flavor to use reportedly caused a brief moment of deliberation at the store. Larry Baur told Time magazine in 2008 that the family stopped at a Walgreens on the way to the funeral home, and after some discussion, chose original flavor. Part of Baur's ashes went into the Pringles can; the remainder went into a traditional urn. Both were buried at Arlington Memorial Gardens in Springfield Township, Ohio.

The story went viral when it was reported later that year, introducing Baur's name to millions of people who had eaten Pringles their entire lives without ever wondering who designed them. It is a peculiar kind of posthumous fame — being known not for living but for how you chose to be buried.

Pringles: The Controversy

Despite Baur's elegant engineering, Pringles has always occupied a contentious position in the snack food world. The product was the subject of debates — some lighthearted, some legal — about whether Pringles are actually "potato chips" at all.

Traditional potato chips are sliced from whole potatoes. Pringles are made from a dough of dehydrated potato flakes, wheat starch, corn starch, and rice flour, which is pressed into molds, fried, and seasoned. The manufacturing process is closer to making a cracker than slicing a chip.

In 2008 (the same year Baur died), a British court ruled that Pringles were indeed "potato crisps" for tax purposes, subjecting them to the UK's value-added tax on potato products. Procter & Gamble had argued that the product's low potato content (about 42 percent) and manufactured shape made it something other than a crisp. The court disagreed. This was later overturned on appeal, with the ruling that Pringles were not potato crisps, then reversed again at a higher court. The legal journey of a saddle-shaped chip through the British court system was almost as unlikely as its inventor's burial arrangements.

In the United States, the FDA required Procter & Gamble to use the term "potato crisps" rather than "potato chips" for Pringles, though this distinction has faded from consumer awareness. Most Americans call them chips regardless of what the labeling technically says — much like how peanuts are called nuts despite being legumes.

The Legacy of Good Packaging

Baur's contribution to the world was, fundamentally, better packaging. That might sound modest, but packaging is one of the most underappreciated factors in how we eat. The shelf life, portability, portion consistency, and waste reduction of food products all depend on packaging design.

The Pringles can was innovative enough to earn Baur a patent (US Patent 3,498,798, filed in 1966 and granted in 1970). The cylindrical container with its resealable lid was a genuine advance in snack food preservation and portability. Its influence can be seen in numerous subsequent stackable chip products that adopted similar approaches.

Baur worked at Procter & Gamble for decades and held multiple patents across food science and packaging. The Pringles can was not his only contribution, but it was the one he loved best — the one he wanted to take with him.

There is something satisfying about a man who solved a problem so neatly that he wanted the solution to be his final resting place. In a world where most inventors are separated from their inventions by corporate anonymity and the passage of time, Fredric Baur achieved a permanent, physical union with his. Somewhere in a cemetery in Ohio, inside a can that once held original-flavor Pringles, the man who made snack food history rests in the container he designed — a fitting monument to practical ingenuity.