Chris Spiess wanted to expand his company's potato chip business beyond the Rockford area.
Adam Vitale wanted to expand his company's business beyond beverages.
Following a blind email, telephone calls and face-to-face meetings over about nine months, Mrs. Fisher's potato chips have arrived in west-central Illinois.
It only took about 90 years. Then again, perhaps good things can't be rushed.
"This is more of a marathon. Just making sure the brand and everything stays the same as we begin to expand," said Spiess, the Mrs. Fisher's Inc. vice president.
Over the past few months, Mrs. Fisher's chips have become available at stores in Bushnell, Canton, Farmington, Galesburg, Knoxville, Lewistown, Macomb, Monmouth, Princeton and Roseville. Interstate 80 had been the approximate southern limit.
By the end of this year, the chips also might be available in Peoria. That's the goal of Spiess, who envisions his firm's snack foods also reaching the Bloomington-Normal and Champaign-Urbana markets.
"We want to be Illinois' chip, and that's what we're striving to do," Spiess said.
Mrs. Fisher's partner in this most recent expansion appears to share Spiess' enthusiasm.
Also: Here are five Illinois restaurants worth the drive outside the Tri-County Area
"I feel we're just starting to scratch the surface with it," said Vitale, president of Galesburg-based G&M Distributors Inc.
"A lot of people outside the Sauk Valley (Sterling-Dixon) and Rockford areas have not heard of Mrs. Fisher's. We're got a good one to two years of getting good, solid recognition, building the brand and hoping to expand with it."
In business for 75 years, family-owned G&M specializes in liquor distribution. Expansion into snacks seemed like a logical progression, particularly after Vitale heard from Spiess.
"It was almost like fate," Vitale said. "Kind of a match made in heaven."
Mrs. Fisher's devotees in northern Illinois might consider their favorite chip to be heavenly, flavor-wise. They have a cult-level following around Rockford, where in 1932 Eugene and Ethel Fisher founded the company.
In 2007, longtime employee Roma Hailman and her husband, who died in 2013, purchased Mrs. Fisher's. The company has about a dozen employees, including Spiess, who said he started there by sweeping crumbs off the cutting-room floor.
"We love the fact that they're an Illinois-based company, family owned, woman owned," Vitale said.
Mrs. Fisher's chips can be found in about 700 outlets, according to Spiess. But it is entering a market that already has two well-established regional potato-chip brands.
Farmington long has been home of Kitchen Cooked chips, which also once had a facility in Bushnell. Like Kitchen Cooked, Sterzing's Potato Chips of Burlington, Iowa, can be found in stores in Peoria and points west.
Spiess noted the three firms' common roots; each began during the Great Depression. But he said each company's chip has unique ingredients, such as different types of shortening.
More: 5 of the best places to get a tasty burger in the Peoria area. Here's why we chose them
Vitale and Spiess also alluded to Kitchen Cooked no longer being under local control. In 2019, its merger with Pennsylvania-based Utz Quality Foods was announced.
"We're all trying to put food on the table," Spiess said about his new competition. "We think we can equally do that without stepping on anybody's toes. We're out here just kind of having fun and giving the customers what they're asking for."
If things had turned out a little differently back in the day, customers might be asking for Mr. Fisher's instead. That was the original name of the brand.
After Eugene Fisher left his wife during the Depression, she kept the potato-chip equipment and changed the company's honorific.
"Branding is all about selling a good story, too," Vitale said.
The Link LonkMay 28, 2021 at 05:20PM
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Will Peoria find a new favorite potato chip as Rockford-based Mrs. Fisher's expands? - Peoria Journal Star
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