Better Made: Detroit's Last Chip Standing

In the 1930s, Detroit had more than twenty potato-chip companies all fighting for the city’s lunch pails. Today essentially one hometown name is left standing: Better Made, still frying chips on Gratiot Avenue.

It began in 1930, when two Sicilian immigrants, Cross Moceri and Peter Cipriano, went into the chip business together — first as the “Cross & Peters Company.” The name changed to Better Made a few years later, reportedly as a poke at a rival called “Best Maid.” In the early days the partners fried chips, hand-stapled them into waxed-paper bags, and sold them door-to-door, at movie theaters, and from stands out on Belle Isle. As the business grew, it moved in 1955 into the red-brick factory on Gratiot where it still operates.

Better Made has stayed family-owned and proudly local — still run by the Cipriano family nearly a century on. And Detroiters have held up their end: by one oft-quoted figure, the average American eats about four pounds of potato chips a year, while Detroiters put away around seven.