Zapp's Chips Guy Has Died

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Ron Zappe, founder of Zapp's Potato Chips, died Tuesday in Houston.

The 67-year-old affable Baton Rouge community leader was undergoing treatment for throat cancer at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Zappe's four Texas petroleum service companies went bankrupt in the 1980s' oil bust and the entrepreneur moved to Louisiana and reinvented himself as a potato chip maker.
"My wife, Anne, thought I'd gone nuts," Zappe said in speeches to students and audiences. "But I told her, 'No, not nuts, chips.'"

Zappe experimented with and perfected a thicker-cut, kettle-fried potato chip using high-grade peanut oil.

"I asked 10 banks for a loan to begin the venture and they all laughed me out of the office," he recalled. "The 11th finally gave me my start. I never gave up. That's the secret."
In 1985, Zappe moved from Houston to Baton Rouge and purchased the empty former Faucheux Chevrolet dealership in Gramercy.

"We made chips on the showroom floor and teenagers would park outside, watch us like a movie and do a lot of kissing!" Zappe told Oprah Winfrey in 1997 on her show. The good-humored businessman landed in national publications as People magazine and The Wall Street Journal.
Zapp's Tiger Tators became the first food product licensed by LSU. Zappe sold "Who Dat?" chips 10 years before the New Orleans NFL franchise won the Super Bowl. But his favorite was his first, "Cajun Crawtators" developed in 1985 as the nation's first spicy potato chip.
His unconventional marketing worked. Zapp's became the No. 2 snack food in Louisiana and Texas and a gulf coast bestseller.

The company employs 200 in chipmaking facilities from coast to coast including the popular Natural® brand, "Dirty" Potato Chips. In the last two years, Zappe acquired a California potato chip maker and turned it profitable. Zapp's sales have grown by double digits over the last decade, despite Hurricane Katrina.

Zappe is survived by his wife, Anne, son Eric, daughter Kristin and three grandchildren. Funeral services will be held at St. James Episcopal Church in Baton Rouge. Dates and times are still pending