The little chippery that could

Ask a Cajun what he just bought at the supermarket, and his grocery list will come out sounding like decades of embellished folklore. Listen to a Minnesotan describe the sleeper cell next door and it all sounds so commonplace. These are the lots drawn by such divergent accents, so when Zapp’s new CEO Rod Olson speaks in a clipped Midwestern tone, he not only sounds like William H. Macy in Fargo, but every word feels like the God’s-honest truth.

According to Ron Zappe’s wife, Anne, the Zapp’s Potato Chips founder never let the facts get in the way of a good story. He once told Oprah that local teens treated his Chevrolet showroom-turned-chippery like a drive-in, as if watching potatoes get sliced and fried was, like Jaws on a hot summer night, the perfect excuse for a good makeout. Truth is, it was never going to be easy to succeed a supremely beloved entrepreneur, charitable giver and jovial man-about-town, one who became infamous for stealing Bevo—UT’s beloved burnt-orange steer—during his junior year at Texas A&M long before he sold his first chip.

Olson just doesn’t happen to see it that way.

It is early August. The 55-year-old Minnesota native has just been on the phone with the Federal Trade Commission. Lance Inc. and Snyder’s of Hanover have announced a stock-for-stock merger creating the second largest salty snack company in the nation, behind only Frito-Lay. The feds want to know how the pretzel and potato chip giants combining their operations will affect smaller competitors like Zapp’s.

The company Ron Zappe left the busting oil industry to launch in the summer of 1985 started with one fryer and seven hourly employees. Back then, they cranked out batches of thick-cut kettle chips on the showroom floor of an old car dealership. Now, they have more than 100 local employees alone and they produce and distribute a variety of potato chips and snack foods to more than 3,000 grocery stores, gas stations and restaurants nationwide.

With sales growing roughly 10% annually, a plant recently purchased from California Chips now operates under the Zapp’s banner, and another is slated to begin production in Pennsylvania this month. Zappe’s little bag of potato chips has been a big business for years now, but it is about to grow larger.

But the company will have to face the challenges of two new facilities and the Goliath of Snyder’s-Lance without the vision and the leadership of its popular founder.

Christmastime for the Zappes often means vacations to Houston to celebrate with family and old friends from Ron’s days in the oil industry. During the holidays last year, Ron Zappe’s brother-in-law, a longtime ENT, noticed a lump on the 67-year-old’s neck. Zappe had noticed it too, but—always the optimist—he chalked it up to swollen glands. Days later, when the swelling had not subsided, he saw a doctor.

A few routine tests later, the Zappes were informed the lump could be cancerous. Ron was sent to see specialists at M.D. Anderson in Houston. This was serious, but it was detected early, so his chances were good, the doctors said.

“I was in his office when Ron got the call from the doctor,” Olson says. “He did cut his hours back a little, but he was still hunting for new ideas while I ran the day-to-day.”

In February, Zappe began the first of three rounds of chemotherapy, one treatment every three weeks. The trips to Houston and back were quick.

“After treatment, he could not wait to get back in the car to get home,” Anne Zappe recalls. “He was still going to work, and he thought he could beat it. There was no doubt in his mind.”

A natural entertainer, the affable Zappe decided against making any kind of mass statement announcing his illness. Deep down, perhaps Zappe feared the pall such disclosure could cast on his relationships. He didn’t want everyone to know. Sick or not, he was determined to have some fun.

“He didn’t want to bore people with his complaints,” says friend David Floyd, director of LSU Rural Life Museum where Zappe helped create an annual beer festival for charity. “He was an overgrown 12-year-old, yes, but he also knew business and the keys to success. Cold or cancer, he didn’t let it affect him publicly.”

Zappe’s optimism came easy in part because he had made it through nine weeks of chemotherapy without too much physical strain. Radiation, though, would be much more devastating to his body. Zappe reported to M.D. Anderson the first week of May for what was scheduled to be six weeks of daily therapy.

The Zappes rented a condo in Houston, and Ron set up a makeshift workspace inside his attorney’s office. After radiation, he would drop Anne off at the condo and put in a few hours online and on the phone with the headquarters in Gramercy. He even printed and hung a sign: “Zapp’s Houston Office”—a whimsical idea in the middle of a battle that only Ron Zappe would have followed through on.

A man of extremes, Zappe was a daring but frugal entrepreneur who resisted getting a cell phone or a personal computer “long after everyone else had them,” Anne says. Zappe worked constantly, keeping a voice recorder in his car and a notepad by the bed to jot down marketing ideas as they came to him, even in the middle of the night. “Sometimes they didn’t make a lick of sense in the morning,” Anne says with a laugh. Yet he dreaded Monday mornings and always promoted “fun Fridays” at Zapp’s headquarters. Zappe made sure production halted during lunch hour and on weekends, a tradition Olson continues today.

Riding Barney, a vintage fire truck he had painted LSU purple, Zappe reveled his way through a handful of parades each year, including Orpheus in New Orleans and Spanish Town and Wearin’ of the Green here in Baton Rouge. But he was also a devout member of St. James Episcopal Church who took his faith and his responsibility to give back to the community seriously.

In college, Zappe was a rascal scholar, both famous for being named Texas A&M’s Outstanding Freshman in 1961, and notorious for a brief, albeit successful collegiate cattle-rustling career. “They had the Texas Rangers after them,” Anne says. The UT mascot was returned and the charges were dropped.

“He was so bold,” Olson recalls. “In everything he did.”

Despite this, Zappe struggled with bouts of claustrophobia, and the form-fitting mask that kept his head still for radiation made him incredibly uneasy. To get through the treatments at M.D. Anderson, he would tell people, “I’m planning my party.” The company’s 25th anniversary was coming up on July 1, but Zappe was also thinking of a celebration to thank everyone who had supported him through his cancer battle—a raucous time with Anne and the entire Zapp’s family, live music, rides on Barney and lots and lots of potato chips.

Zappe never had the chance to finish those plans. He died June 1.

His party turned into a joyous memorial at St. James in downtown Baton Rouge.

Ron Zappe’s old office is a modest corner space that looks out onto a paved drive and, further in the distance, the tall green timbers that canopy much of the surrounding rural countryside. The room is quiet now, still.

More out of reverence than neglect, the staff has kept Zappe’s office just as the local potato chip icon left it before the move to Houston kept him far from his home in Baton Rouge and this, his beloved “little chippery in Gramercy.”

Two months after Zappe’s funeral saw friends and former colleagues fly in from across the country, family and well-wishers climb aboard Barney, and Rev. J. Mark Holland ask attendees to take a bag of Zapp’s chips at the door to keep as “an icon for doing something good with your life, just as Ron did with his life,” Ron and Anne beam loving smiles into his office from a framed 4×6 photo on the desk. A news magazine looks like it was read just yesterday. A clutch of business awards and accolades hangs near the door. A row of dust-free engines from Zappe’s large model train collection sits beneath a window on a polished wood hutch.

Rod Olson walks through his predecessor’s office. He knows Zapp’s better than anyone. As a distributor, he was one of the company’s very first hires 25 years ago when he began pitching chips to bars and corner stores in Uptown New Orleans—all out of the family Dodge. Two weeks on the job and Olson had 50 accounts.

He picks up one of the trains, looks it over, then gazes out the window.

“When Ron first moved into this corner office, he was amazed at all the activity—the number of trucks coming in and out all day,” Olson says, his accent nasal and crystal clear. “Watching it in that way really made him realize how much the business had grown since he started it.”

Friends say Zappe used that success as a conduit for doing all the things he truly wanted, especially helping others. He donated proceeds from his Who Dat? chips to the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank, launched Heaven’s Harvest rice to support the organization, served on the board and saved the group serious cash by working his connections to get the Food Bank wholesale prices on food and packaging.

“He was interested in doing whatever he could to help feed the hungry,” says Food Bank CEO Mike Manning. “Whenever the Food Bank had issues, that’s when the marketer in Ron came out.”

Zappe also gave lectures to business classes at LSU, where his favorite line was, “You have to love what you do, otherwise it’s like getting up for an 8 a.m. class every day.”

Everyone who knew Zappe could tell he loved his job.

“Ron was the type that got bored easily,” Anne says. “Even before the oil industry went south, he was telling me he was ready to do something new. With Zapp’s, he really blossomed. You don’t realize how talented someone is until they are gone, and I think his legacy is just showing what you can do by using your talent to do the best you can every day, and sharing the fruits of that with the community.”

Without her husband, Anne and her two grown children Eric and Kristin will be more involved going forward, but not overly so. “Quarterly meetings,” Anne says. “We’ll have input, but we so trust Rod and the team in place at Zapp’s.”

Just as important to the bottom line is that the company continues Zappe’s community efforts, Olson says. Zappe left notes to his staff to continue supporting the Food Bank, the Rural Life Museum and others, but according to Olson, Zappe never had to ask.

As Olson places the toy train back down on the hutch, his thoughts turn from the past to the present. In its new issue, Real Simple ranked several Zapp’s products in its list of the best potato chips in the country. Then there’s Snyder’s-Lance, Inc.

“I told the FTC that (Snyder’s-Lance) won’t be able to raise prices, so in the near term it doesn’t change anything,” Olson says, lining up Zappe’s train perfectly next to the others. “What Ron would say is, ‘There are plenty of customers for everyone,’ and I believe as long as we keep making a great-tasting chip, we’ll find people who want to sell it.”

Zappe would not have been worried, and honestly, neither is Olson.