NEWS

Jones Potato Chip forced to tinker with flavor

Customers who prefer flavor of FDA-banned oil should stock up

Linda Martz
Reporter
Bob Jones, the CEO for Jones Potato Chip Co., holds two bags of potato chip. On the left is the original chips that are fried in partially hydrogenated oil, while on the right is fried with corn or cottonseed oils.

MANSFIELD­ - Sometime this fall, Jones Potato Chip Co. will make its last bag of chips containing partially hydrogenated oil.

That's a stunning blow to many north central Ohio customers who loved the flavor that ingredient gave chips the company made over most of the past 70 years.

CEO Bob Jones wants customers to know the decision was out of his hands, the result of a federal mandate banning the ingredient, an industrially manufactured product the food industry began using around the 1950s to increase shelf life for processed foods.

Many Mansfield area customers — and many other Midwesterners — happen to prefer chips made with partially hydrogenated oil.

That type of oil turns into a white solid, cooled outside of the fryer to room temperature — giving products made with them a very different flavor and mouth feel than snacks made with oils that stay transparent when cooled.

It's a flavor that "put us in business" 70 years ago, after his father started the company, Jones said.

"Other areas of the country, to be honest, don't care for the flavor of chips made with partially hydrogenated oil," he said.

The Mansfield-based company had begun phasing out partially hydrogenated oil over the past several years, instead using corn or cottonseed oil in newly introduced lines and some existing products, especially those it sells out of state.

Wavy potato chips are now the last remaining Jones product made with that type of oil, which the company had been using for decades.

In June 2015, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that food manufacturers could no longer use that type of oil, the main source of artificial trans fats used in processed foods, saying the ingredient was not fit for human consumption.

Snack makers technically could still use the product until 2018. However, oil suppliers will cease manufacture around October, Jones said.

Jones, a small chip-making company, expects to run out of either the banned oil, or of traditionally labeled bags meant to contain them, after that happens. "I'm trying to run out of everything at the same time," with no waste, he said. "We happened to use partially hydrogenated soybean oil."

Jones said the company will announce the last day of production using the ingredient.

That should give fans of the traditional chips time to stock up, since bags with chips made using the locally traditional oil may not disappear from local store shelves for a couple of weeks.

"There's some people who are more aware, and they are buying more," Jones said. Potato chips can be frozen, as long as they are well sealed, he said.

Local customers can easily tell which bags of chip are made under the old formula and which are new, since bags for newer product lines were redesigned with a new look. "If the bag has a picture of chips on it, it's got the new oil," Jones said.

Jones said the company has been using its Facebook page to telling customers about the ban since fall. "We have started a transition. We wanted to make sure there was an awareness of what was happening," he said.

But word didn't get out to everyone  — and in some cases, got garbled.

"There was some confusion that we might be going out of business. We got phone calls from people who ask 'Are you going to stop making chips?'" Jones said.

He heard from long-time customers who ate the new lines of chips, and were dismayed by a change.

Some customers "strongly prefer" the old chips, some are indifferent to the change, and "some say it's better," he said.

Ironically, Jones Potato Chips started transitioning for markets outside this area a little less than a decade ago, in a move that strengthens its current position. Chips using partially hydrogenated oils were "100 percent of what we produced — up until 2007," Jones said.

At that point, the company started making potato sticks marketed near the East Coast, where customers tend to react negatively to partially hydrogenated oils.

Companies outside Ohio "didn't want chips with partially hydrogenated oil anyway," Jones said.

Jones has grown its market in recent years, selling chips made with other types of oils in states including New York, Michigan, Florida. During the past year and a half, Jones started sending potato sticks to Puerto Rico, and in January began producing chips with avocado oil for East Coast cities.

"We set a record for production in 2015. We'll probably have as good a year in 2016 as any year we have ever had," Jones said.

Currently, 80 percent of Jones' products don't contain the banned oil, he said.

But the local preference was for partially hydrogenated. "So we continued to make it, primarily for a market of about a 40-mile area surrounding Mansfield, or for any consumer that has moved and still wants Jones chips," he said.

Jones said many smaller snack makers that are wrestling with a transition because of the FDA mandate are located in the Midwest.

Jones said he's been search for an alternative with a similar flavor for years. "It doesn't exist," he said.

The Mansfield businessman wasn't pleased by the FDA mandate. "The fact that the government is forcing us to do that, nobody really likes that," he said.

"There are other products on the market that are extremely harmful. There are products that can kill you, but they're still legal," he added.

"It goes back to personal choice. If people eat moderately, I think they can safely eat a variety of foods," he said.

But "I'm not here to fight a health battle," he said.

lmartz@gannett.com
419-521-7229
Twitter: @MNJmartz