Kettle Chips: Cameron Healy — The Wild Bet That Made a Brand

Cameron Healy built a $300 million potato chip brand by doing almost everything backward: he skipped the U.S. expansion entirely and launched his thick-cut, kettle-cooked chips in the United Kingdom — one of the most competitive snack markets on earth — before most Americans had ever heard of him. This episode of *How I Built This* traces Healy's improbable journey from a turban-wearing Sikh entrepreneur in 1970s Salem, Oregon, through a catastrophic oil-rancidity disaster that nearly killed his company, to the word-of-mouth explosion that made Kettle Chips a British phenomenon (boosted by a photo of Princess Diana carrying a bag). Along the way, Healy also co-founded Kona Brewing Company, which lost $20,000 a month for years before a single strategic decision turned it around. The conversation has the feel of a reflective, slightly amused founder looking back at risks that seemed reckless at the time but were driven by a combination of naivete, intuition, and a willingness to live with ambiguity.

7:21Building a Life in a Sikh Community in Salem

In the early 1970s, Cameron Healy and his wife relocated to Salem, Oregon, as part of a Sikh communal living movement that emerged from the post-Woodstock counterculture. Healy described it as "constructive rebellion" — an attempt to create an alternative culture and economy. The community's daily discipline was intense: everyone had to wake up at 3 a.m. for two and a half hours of group yoga and meditation. "Builds a lot of character," Healy noted dryly.

Living as a white family wearing turbans in a small Oregon town in 1973 made him "not that employable," as he put it. So he started a natural foods distribution business, borrowing money from his father to buy an old refrigerated truck. He drove the I-5 corridor from Seattle to southern Oregon, distributing raw milk and later snack foods from Southern California. The business grew, and Healy turned over ownership to the community. But by 1978, the natural foods movement was scaling rapidly, and the grassroots, untrained entrepreneurs running these businesses struggled to adapt. Healy, who had been the visionary behind most of the community's ventures, was "summarily dismissed" — fired with no severance, four kids, and no income.

12:04Starting from Scratch with a $10,000 Loan

After being fired, Healy needed income fast. He began distributing bulk cheese and nuts, but he needed working capital. A local banker in Salem who was an avid skier at Mount Bachelor agreed to give Healy a $10,000 loan — a decision Healy admits was risky: "He shouldn't have been loaning me money. I was at complete risk." Healy sweetened the deal with free ski passes to Mount Bachelor, a mountain his father had helped develop from a simple rope tow and warming hut into a major resort.

With that loan, Healy bought a 1930s dry roaster and started roasting bulk nuts, mostly peanuts for the "grind your own peanut butter" stations in natural food stores. The business evolved into trail mixes and branded peanut and almond butters. By 1980, Healy had a small factory and warehouse in Salem. Then came a stroke of speculative luck: his peanut broker tipped him off that a drought would cause a major crop failure. Healy went "very bullish," contracting far more peanuts than he needed. When the market price tripled, he sold truckloads of peanuts — 50,000 pounds at a time — making about $25,000 per truckload. That windfall capitalized his business, which had been "extremely thin on working capital."

14:06The Maui Chip That Sparked an Idea

In 1982, Healy read a Wall Street Journal article about the Maui Potato Chip Company — a small operation making thick, crunchy, kettle-cooked chips that were completely different from the thin, continuous-fry chips from Frito-Lay and Ruffles. Healy was intrigued. He had oil roasters from his nut business and thought potato chips could be a high-turnover product that might bridge the gap between natural food stores and mainstream supermarkets.

Healy traveled to Hawaii to investigate. The owner, a Filipino man, greeted him with a grandchild on his hip and dogs running around, but refused to let Healy inside the factory. The key insight came when Healy asked about the "special Maui potatoes" mentioned in the article. The owner laughed: "No, that was a misunderstanding. There's no regular potatoes grow in Hawaii. All of my potatoes come from Klamath Falls, Oregon." The light bulb went off: if this guy could build a cult following shipping potatoes from Oregon to Hawaii, Healy could do the same thing from Oregon itself.

Back in Salem, Healy had already spent $1,200 — a fortune to him at the time — on a graphic designer to create a brand. The original name was "Pot Chips" (short for "potato" and referencing the kettle). Everyone told him it was a terrible name — "that word can mean a lot of different things." So he went back to the designer and said, "Same design, just change 'pot' to 'kettle.'" Kettle Chips was born.

24:48Trial by Fire: Learning to Make Chips Without a Playbook

Healy had no YouTube, no internet, no manual. He had to figure out potato chip manufacturing through pure trial and error. The nut business ran during the day, so chip production happened at night. They used two oil fryers — vats about four and a half feet long by four feet wide — and a food-service potato slicer that was barely adequate. Workers hand-fed 50-pound bags of potatoes into the hot oil.

The key variable was temperature. When cold potato slices hit the oil, the temperature drops and then gradually rises. Healy later learned that this temperature variation is what creates the character of a hand-cooked chip — the extra crunchiness. They chose Russet Burbank potatoes because they produce the highest natural sugars, which caramelize at frying temperatures to create a darker, more flavorful chip. Starting out, they could make 40 cases per night (12 bags per case). Healy still has a photograph of himself, a young man in a turban, holding the first two bags off the line in late July 1982.

The chips were priced at about a 25% premium over Lays — roughly 99 cents a bag. There was no marketing budget. They simply put the chips on shelves and, within six months, started doing in-store tastings. By December 1982, Healy had convinced his landlord to build a new factory, taken out a bank loan, and ordered new equipment. Then came the disaster.

29:10The Safeway Disaster and a Car Crash Wake-Up Call

In early 1983, Safeway's Northern California division came calling, enthusiastic about Kettle Chips. To fulfill the order, Healy added a second night shift. But no one understood how fryer oil degrades over time. The second shift threw off the balance, and when Safeway tested the product, the oil was rancid. They rejected the entire truckload.

Healy was at the San Francisco airport, about to board a flight to India for a long-planned trip, when he got the call. He had to tell his team to figure it out without him. From India, where phone calls were difficult, he learned that demand had evaporated. The plant shut down. Healy had taken out large loans to build the new factory, and the situation was existential. Only the nut operation's small profits kept Kettle Chips alive. Safeway never came back.

Driving home from a Seattle trade show where he'd been trying to reassure customers that the problem was fixed, Healy's wife fell asleep at the wheel on I-5. The car skidded across the southbound lanes, rolled onto a grass bank, and shattered all its windows. Everyone was miraculously unhurt. "That was kind of a wake-up," Healy said. "It jolted me out of my depression." He got the plant running again, making good product, and managed to survive. By 1986, Kettle Chips was doing $4.5 million in sales — modest growth, but enough to stabilize.

31:52The Wild Bet on the UK

In 1987, Healy took a motorcycle trip through Europe with his 19-year-old son, Spoon. He'd never been to Europe and wanted to experience the food cultures. In London, he reconnected with Tim Meyer, a fellow Salem native who had been a banker in London and was figuring out his next move. Meyer made a list of stores to visit and British crisp brands to sample. They spread all the bags across a table, tasting and discussing flavors.

Healy sensed a cultural shift underway. The lifestyle values that had driven the natural food movement on the U.S. West Coast — health, fitness, authenticity — were just beginning to emerge in London. Kettle Chips, as a natural foods product, could pioneer a category. Never mind that the company was still a tiny regional brand in Oregon and Washington, thousands of miles away, in an era before cell phones, email, or the internet. "I really enjoyed being in Europe," Healy admitted. "I wanted to have an excuse to keep going back." He called the decision "completely naive" but added: "Very few good things happen without a level of naivete in the beginning. Otherwise, if you knew how hard it would be, you would never do it."

Healy bought a suit and tie — he hadn't owned one — and flew back to London with samples. Meyer arranged a meeting with a potato supplier in Norfolk and connected with Derwent Valley Foods, which made Phileas Fogg tortilla chips. Their first test: they placed Kettle Chips in three convenience stores inside London train stations, giving the product away for free in exchange for manager interviews. All three stores sold out that first weekend. On the strength of that, Healy set up a network of small independent distributors. Initial orders came in, then went quiet. For months, there were no reorders. Healy had "literally bet the farm" with loans to set up a UK factory. "I was sweating bullets," he said.

Then, in early June 1989, word of mouth "switched on." All five major UK supermarket chains called in the same week. They saw Kettle Chips as a symbol of the new wave of natural foods they wanted to carry. The brand took off like a rocket, quickly surpassing U.S. sales. A popular American-born TV host, Ruby Wax, ate them on her show without being paid. Then came the ultimate endorsement: a photograph of Princess Diana carrying a bag of Kettle Chips with her groceries. "Can't beat that," Healy said. "That's better than her HRH seal on the side of the package."

56:03Kona Brewing: The Money Pit That Turned Around

In 1993, Healy was on another family vacation in Hawaii. His son Spoon had moved to the Big Island and found "paradise." Healy rented a house on a bay in South Kona and had an epiphany: he needed to figure out how to live part-time in that specific place. At the same time, he noticed that no beer was being brewed in Hawaii, and very little craft beer was imported. The craft brewing movement in Oregon — which Healy had discovered through the real ales he'd enjoyed in English pubs with Tim Meyer — was analogous to the natural food movement: an alternative to industrial approaches.

Healy proposed starting a brewery with his son. They opened Kona Brewing in 1995. But manufacturing beer in Hawaii was brutally expensive. The islands don't produce hops or malt, distribution across 270 miles of ocean was costly, and alcohol taxes were high. The brewery plateaued at a certain sales level, losing about $20,000 per month — for years. "I was the one that had to cover the cost," Healy said. Spoon eventually left the business.

Healy recruited a young manager from Portland. The turnaround came from a single strategic decision: move the bottling production to the mainland and find a contract producer there. "That's where we were losing our shirt," Healy explained. By January 1999 — three years after launch — Kona Brewing became profitable. The brand was partially sold in 2010 and has since grown into a nationally recognized craft beer.

1:00:15The Exit and What Came After

By the early 2000s, Kettle Chips was doing about $100 million in sales. Healy and Tim Meyer were still making all key decisions in pubs and restaurants. They realized they needed a proper board and outside guidance. They brought in Catterton Partners, a private equity firm specializing in consumer brands, which bought a third of the business. They recruited a global CEO and did their first comprehensive strategic plan.

Within two years, the business had grown by 50%. In 2006, a UK-based investment firm called Lion Capital offered to buy Kettle Foods for over $300 million. Healy and Meyer still owned 67% of the business. "I'd been at it for 27 years," Healy said. "It was an amazing outcome." He walked away after the sale, declining an advisory role. "We didn't do all this to sit in the back of the bus."

With his newfound resources, Healy started a foundation focused on environmental issues and domestic abuse. The board recently voted to spend down the entire endowment — about $75-80 million — by 2029. "I didn't want to have to worry about managing a foundation through my 80s," Healy explained. The foundation was named outstanding foundation in Hawaii last year.

Conclusion

What stays with the listener is the sheer improbability of Healy's trajectory: a fired Sikh communal farmer who taught himself to fry potatoes, then bet everything on selling American chips to the British, then started a Hawaiian brewery that bled money for years. Healy's success came from a willingness to be naive, to live with ambiguity, and to trust his intuition about cultural timing. But he also credits his teams — "the ones that really executed" — and his decades of yoga and meditation practice, which helped him stay balanced through high-risk periods. The episode matters because it shows that the conventional wisdom about "expand local → regional → national → international" is not the only path. Sometimes skipping the middle steps, however reckless it seems, is exactly what makes a brand iconic.

Key takeaways

• Healy's decision to launch Kettle Chips in the UK before expanding across the U.S. was driven by intuition and personal desire, not strategic planning — and it worked because British consumers were primed for a natural, premium crisp.
• The Safeway oil-rancidity disaster nearly killed the company; only the nut operation's small profits kept Kettle Chips alive, highlighting the value of having a diversified revenue stream during early-stage crises.
• A car crash on I-5, in which Healy's family was miraculously unhurt, jolted him out of depression and refocused him on fixing the business — a reminder that external shocks can sometimes break through entrepreneurial paralysis.
• Princess Diana's unplanned endorsement — a photograph of her carrying Kettle Chips — was more valuable than any paid marketing campaign, illustrating the power of organic cultural moments.
• Kona Brewing lost $20,000 per month for years until Healy moved bottling production to the mainland, proving that sometimes the solution to a failing business is not to try harder but to change the fundamental cost structure.
• Healy attributes his ability to handle stress and risk to decades of yoga and meditation practice, suggesting that mental discipline can be a competitive advantage for entrepreneurs.
• Healy's foundation is spending down its entire $75-80 million endowment by 2029, a deliberate choice to maximize impact now rather than manage a perpetual institution.