Fifty years ago, a snack shaped like a curl of streaky bacon rolled off a production line in west London, and the British corner shop was never quite the same. Frazzles — bright red, unapologetically artificial, and made entirely of corn — have gone on to become one of the longest-surviving crisps in the country, outlasting flavours, fads and, in some ways, the very company that invented them.
Born from Smith's
Frazzles were created in 1975 by Smith's, the crisp company founded in 1920 by Frank Smith, a former apprentice greengrocer who started out selling plain crisps with a twist of salt wrapped in greaseproof paper. Smith's grew quickly, becoming the dominant force in British crisps through the 1930s, 40s and 50s, a fixture behind nearly every pub bar in the country.
By the time Frazzles launched, the crisp market had already been reshaped by flavour. Golden Wonder had popularised Cheese & Onion in the 1960s, following the lead of Tayto, and Smith's had answered with its own experiments, including an early Salt & Vinegar crisp. Frazzles took that same appetite for novelty somewhere stranger: rather than a potato crisp with a bacon-adjacent seasoning, it built the illusion of bacon from scratch, in shape as well as in taste.
The Rasher Illusion
The real trick of Frazzles was never the flavour — it was the shape. Made from extruded maize rather than sliced potato, each piece was formed into a wavy, rasher-like curl, then striped with alternating bands of red and cream to mimic streaky bacon. That signature stripe was the work of Leslie Ivey, a toolmaker at Smith's west London factory, who built the machine that could draw the pattern onto each piece as it baked. Unusually for a crisp of its era, Frazzles were baked rather than fried, giving them a lighter, crunchier bite than their fried rivals.
The colour, as it happens, has never come from meat at all — Frazzles are vegetarian, and the streaky look is built from paprika extract, sulphite ammonia caramel and beetroot red working together. A bit of food-science trickery that's been fooling pub-goers for half a century.
Surviving the Big Crisp Consolidation
Frazzles arrived just as Britain's crisp landscape was being consolidated by larger players. Smith's had already absorbed regional rival Tudor Crisps in 1960, and in 1989 Smith's itself, along with Leicester-based Walkers, was bought by PepsiCo. Walkers gradually became PepsiCo's flagship UK crisp brand, and from 2005 Frazzles were relabelled under Walkers' production — though the Smith's name has stayed proudly on the packet ever since, a nod to the brand recognition it still carries with shoppers.
Many of Smith's other once-iconic products didn't make the same journey. Tudor Crisps was discontinued in 2003. But Frazzles, alongside Chipsticks, survived as one of the last standing pieces of the original Smith's range — still sold in the same crimson-and-yellow bag, still shaped like a rasher, still resolutely uninterested in ever containing actual bacon.
Fifty Years of Nostalgia
Part of what has kept Frazzles alive is precisely that refusal to change. The packaging, the shape, the flavour — all have stayed close to their 1975 originals, while entire categories of snack have come and gone around them. That's the same instinct behind our Frazzles giclée print, which draws the packet exactly as it is — bold branding, crinkle-cut shape and all — and our Frazzles greetings card, for anyone who still remembers exactly how to spend their 10p wisely.
Half a century on from that first batch in west London, Frazzles remain exactly what they set out to be: a crisp with the confidence to look like bacon, taste like bacon, and be made of none whatsoever.
