The Inventor of Pringles Is Buried in a Pringles Can
Fredric Baur spent most of his career at Procter & Gamble developing food storage technologies. He created frying oils, engineered freeze-dried ice cream, and invented a packaging design that would become one of the most recognizable containers in the snack food industry: the cylindrical Pringles can.
The problem Baur was trying to solve in 1966 was breakage. Traditional potato chips crumbled in transit, and customers complained about opening bags to find mostly fragments. Baur's solution was to redesign the chip itself—uniform, stackable, saddle-shaped—and house them in a rigid cylindrical tube that would protect them from crushing. He received a patent for the design in 1970.
Baur was proud of the invention. Proud enough that in the 1980s, he told his family he wanted to be buried in one of his cans.
His son Larry initially laughed at the request. The family joked about it for years. But Fredric Baur was serious, and when he died in May 2008 at age 89 after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease, his children honored the request. On their way to the funeral home, Larry and his siblings stopped at a Walgreens and bought a can of Original flavor Pringles.
A portion of Baur's cremated remains were placed inside the can and buried with him at a cemetery in Springfield Township, Ohio, near Cincinnati. The rest of his ashes went into a traditional urn. His children debated which flavor to use—Baur had been an organic chemist, after all, not particularly attached to any one variety—but settled on Original as the most fitting.
Baur had earned degrees from the University of Toledo and Ohio State, served in the Navy as an aviation physiologist, and retired from Procter & Gamble in the early 1980s. The freeze-dried ice cream he developed never caught on. The can did.