National Corn Chip Day

Corn chips are a snack food made by frying or baking cornmeal into bite-sized pieces, sold in a bag and eaten either alone or with a dip. Though its origins are unclear, National Corn Chip Day celebrates this popular snack and the many ways of enjoying it.

If you're a fan of corn chips, then you can thank a man named Charles Elmer Doolin from Texas. Although he didn't invent corn chips, he did popularize them all over the U.S. This man ran a candy store and he wanted to introduce an additional snack food item to increase his sales, so he thought about selling fried tortillas. Unfortunately, he found that all of the fried tortillas that he tried grew stale too quickly for him to sell out of his store. Then he ran across some fried dough strips sold by a local gas station and he knew that he came across something that he wanted to sell.

After some discussions with the owner, he was able to buy the patent for the corn chips. He then took the recipe and improved on it. By 1932, he was selling bags of corn chips out of his store. Over the next 18 plus years, he continued to sell corn chips and by the 1950s they were popular all over the U.S. He was able to popularize corn chips by using factory equipment to mass-produce the chips, which kept them all of the same quality, and by launching a massive marketing campaign behind the product. The rest, as they say, is history.

To celebrate National Corn Chip Day, why not eat a bag of corn chips with some dips, such as salsa or guacamole, or even with melted cheese? It's an ideal snack food.