Local writer Karen Dybis compiles a crisp, tasty history of a Detroit success we've all crunched.

Her second book, released this week, is "Better Made in Michigan / The Salty Story of Detroit's Best Chip."

The 144-page paperback from Arcadia Publishing tells "the flavorful history of Michigan's most iconic chip," its back cover says.


"The fact that Better Made survived from its founding in the 1920s to today is a bit of a miracle," the author writes. (Photo via WDIV)

The book is pegged to 85th anniversary celebrations that Better Made Snack Foods will start Saturday. That same day at 4 p.m., Dybis has a reading and signs copies at Pages Bookshop, 19560 Grand River Ave. in northwest Detroit.

The Grosse Pointe Woods author, a freelance journalist and former Detroit News business writer (2000-09), describes the product as "so simple and yet so complicated. And so, so Detroit."

Better Made has been at the same Gratiot Avenue site on the east side since 1949. The now-sprawling plant has expanded 19 times, president Mark Winkelman tells Ian Thibodeau of MLive, who writes:

It takes about 150,000 square feet of space and a whole lot of potatoes to keep up Metro Detroit's love of Better Made potato chips.

They produce and distribute 2.5 million cases of chips, popcorn and potato sticks a year, operating 250 days a year. . . .

The line runs from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., five days a week, and churns out 2,400 pounds of potato chips an hour.

"Two cousins – Pete Cipriano and Cross Moceri – started Better Made with a single truck and a few hundred dollars in cash," Dybis writes in her book introduction.

The fact that Better Made survived from its founding in the 1920s to today is a bit of a miracle. . . . 

The constant drumbeat of competition from national potato chip companies to fickle consumers to Detroit’s population woes would challenge Better Made in a myriad of ways. When the two families finally separated through a buyout in 2003, there was a moment where it looked like the company might have reached its end.

Yet Better Made persevered. Its continued success is a testament to family pride, employee loyalty, community support and thousands of hungry fans who go out of their way to pass by rack after rack of other brands to grab that iconic yellow-and-red bag.


From the back cover of this week's 144-page history of the Detroit business released by Arcadia Publishing.