The Spudos Story

We love crisps.

Our story isn't a complicated one, but it's a strange one for sure.  Spudos was started by Analog Republic, who are actually a web and mobile app development company who work with household name clients in everything from top music artists through to healthcare research studies.  Now, I'm sure you have a ton of questions after reading that, so let's do "our story" as a Q&A session.

How did you get into crisps?
Del loves crisps, and Chris loves crazy ideas. They're Analog Republic's founders. They'd been working at becoming more minimal waste in their own lives, as well as working on zero waste technology projects, when Del realised one of the items he still had to purchase wrapped in plastic was his beloved crisps. 

He looked around for a sustainable way to get his hands on unpackaged crisps, and he wanted good cheek wrinkling flavoured crisps like his favourite Taytos, but there was nothing on the market to quench his hunger.  So after pitching the idea to Chris, Spudos was born.

Did you know about crisps and food production already?
No, we didn't have a clue, and we needed to learn fast, so we hired a crisp consultant.

Is there really such a thing as a "crisp consultant"?
Yes.

What do they do?
They held our hand through the process of coming up with flavours, nutrition, allergens, micros, flavour designers, producers and more.  It was a crash course and a steep learning curve.

What happened next?
We got ourselves an up-cycled shipping container for Spudos HQ and started working on finding a way to get our crisps cooked, our flavours produced and researching our environmentally friendly packaging. Initially we just planned on selling to zero waste shops, so we were building all kinds of contraptions for dispensing crisps for the refill market. But it wasn't long before the public came knocking on our door.

Soon we were selling direct to the public and expanding our flavours. But packaging was always a problem we needed to solve.

What did you do on the packaging side?
Our first crisp bags rendition were these off the shelf home compostable bags.  They worked well for getting us going, but they'd rip really easily, so we kept hunting.  We found a new material that looked great and felt great, so we had our first custom bags made.  When winter kicked in we found that when this material got too cold, it got brittle and we started to suffer from lots of burst deliveries.

After much trial and error we got a laminate produced that was both strong, greaseproof and airtight, but which was also home compostable. This bag has been adapted over time to our current version with the new zip lock.

What about the crisps?
We'd got hooked up (by our crisp consultant) with a brilliant farm for purchasing our potatoes.  They were very sustainable, running on solar power, using biodiesel for their tractors and even had their own rain water reservoir. 

We were tired of opening other brands crisp bags to find 2 decent crisps and a load of crumbs, so we made sure our bags were packed with delicious big crisps that were the perfect thickness and perfect crunch.

And the Spud Dust?
We're pretty tongue and cheek here at Spudos, we don't take ourselves too seriously, so when we first started doing our Spud Dust, we'd try to come up with funny names and combos. Del was a big David Beckham fan boy, so we had a flavour called "David Bacon" - and to accompany it, we also released "Nosh Spice".  This was of course before being informed about the meaning of "Nosh" up north! So that flavour got retired pretty quickly!

And what about Dragons' Den?
We got approached in early 2024 about going in the Den.  After a bit of deliberation we thought we'd give it a go and it was an incredible experience all round.

Have you eaten a lot of crisps in the process?
Yes, a lot, and Del still loves them plus he's made Chris an addict too. They're probably eating some right now.