Walkers is the UK's favourite crisps brand. Founded in 1948, butcher Henry Walker began making crisps in his Leicester Plant to keep his workers busy, as meat was scarce in post-war Britain.
The Walkers brand offers a range of popular snacks, including Walkers potato crisps, Walkers Extra Crunchy, Quavers and Monster Munch.
The Walkers range also has a selection of great tasting healthier snacks. For example, Walkers Baked which contains 70% less saturated fat than standard Walkers crisps and Sunbites, a snack which offers a third of your daily wholegrain and is 30% lower in fat than standard Walkers.

Origins

The Walkers story begins with Mr. Henry Walker, a successful butcher from Mansfield, England, who relocated in the 1880s to run a shop in Leicester. Walker's operation eventually began making meat pies. It was moved to Cheapside in 1912.
Walker started a new sideline when postwar rationing made meat scarce. Under the guidance of managing director R.E. Gerrard, in 1948 the firm began frying potato slices in a fish fryer. When meat rationing ended in 1954, the company continued making its popular crisps, introducing its best-selling cheese and onion-flavored variety the same year.
PepsiCo Buys Walkers in 1989
By the end of the 1980s, snacks were a £1 billion industry in the United Kingdom. By this time, Walkers was owned by Nabsico, which also held the Smiths, Tudor, and Planters brands. Walkers was still then primarily a regional brand in the Midlands, while Smiths crisps had national distribution. Each had a share of about 19 percent of the United Kingdom's salty snack market, though Smiths' emphasis was on low prices.
The French group acquired Walkers when it bought all of RJR Nabisco's European biscuit (cookie and cracker) and snack interests (five companies in all) for $2.5 billion in June 1989. (RJR had been acquired by buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.)

A month later, PepsiCo, Inc. acquired Walkers Crisps and Smith Foods from BSN (later Danone) for $1.35 billion (£900 million). Walkers and Smiths, which had a combined turnover of about £290 million ($460 million), were merged in March 1993. The combined entity was called Walkers Smiths Snack Foods until January 1994, when it was renamed Walkers Snack Foods.
A 1992 Euromonitor survey pegged Walkers with a 33.5 percent share of the £835 million British crisp market. According to the Wall Street Journal, the United Kingdom's snack food market was second only to that of the United States. There seemed to be room for innovation, as the idea of large multi-serving bags had not yet caught on in the United Kingdom, noted an analyst quoted in USA Today. The United Kingdom was also more or less free of corn snacks such as Frito's and Doritos. Americans ate twice as much snack food as Brits, according to Marketing Week, and corn products accounted for the difference.
New Flavours in 2000s
Walkers entered the £120 million Irish snack market in 2000. The company was profitable and had 3,000 employees.
Walkers joined HJ Heinz in developing a co-branded, ketchup-flavored variety of crisps in 2001. Even more exciting