Barney Sterzing never meant to get into the potato chip business. In 1933, when he started the Burlington company that produces the iconic chips that bear his family name, it was the Sterzing Candy Company. But summers in Burlington are hot, and keeping a company going in the midst of the Great Depression was hard enough without its products disintegrating during peak snacking season. So, Barney started selling potato chips in summer in addition to his candy. Potatoes, after all, don’t melt.
Sterzing made his chips fresh every day, and they proved so popular that when World War II rationing severely cut the sugar available to candy manufacturers, he knew what to do.
“Barney stayed with the principle of putting quality first,” Warren Duttweiler, Sterzing’s cousin, told the Des Moines Register in 1988, when Sterzing died at age 76. “That simple philosophy has held up well over the years.”
Duttweiler bought the company and took over as president when Sterzing retired in 1959.
“We’ve stayed small because Barney thought that growth meant sacrificing quality,” Duttweiler explained. “We’ve tried to stay with his concepts.”
They did more than try. It wouldn’t be until the 1980s, when Sterzing’s introduced its ruffled chip, that the company made a potato chip that was different from the ones it had been making since the ’30s. It was also in the ’80s that the company began regularly distributing outside its traditional 50-mile area around Burlington. Sterzing’s Potato Chips didn’t land on grocery store shelves in Des Moines until the year 2000.
Sterzing’s followed a very different trajectory than a potato-chip-based business founded the year before Barney started his candy company. Herman Lay launched his company in 1932, selling someone else’s potato chips out of the back of his Model A. Herman’s focus was always on sales and scale, and after major corporate mergers in the 1960s, his company became Frito-Lay, a subsidiary of PepsiCo, and Lay’s came to dominate the potato chip market in the U.S.
Sterzing’s, on the other hand, is still in Burlington. It’s no longer as small as it was—its chips can be found in stores around the state. It’s changed to a healthier, trans-fat-free oil for frying. And it’s no longer owned by Barney’s relatives, although the pair who bought the company in 2011 both started their working lives there. Like its founder, the company understands some things are more important than being big.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s 2024 Bread & Butter special issue.
