Better Made Chips: The Detroit History and the Rainbow Bag

There were more than 20 potato chip companies in Detroit at one time, according to the Detroit Historical Society. One of them is still running. It makes its chips at 10148 Gratiot Ave., on the east side, in a plant the company says now covers 170,000 square feet.

Better Made began in 1930, when Cross Moceri and Peter Cipriano went into the potato chip business together. Both were Sicilian immigrants, and Hour Detroit described them as childhood friends. The company's own history says the first operation was 5,000 square feet. The early business was called Cross & Peters, after the founders' first names. In 1934 they put their chips out under the brand name Better Made, which is the name everyone in Michigan knows.

The partners started in the Depression and kept going through it. After World War II, the Detroit Historical Society says, the company settled on Gratiot Avenue between Harper Avenue and French Road, which is where it has stayed. Hour Detroit, in a 2018 look back at a 1971 photograph of the two founders on the factory floor, noted the plant had several homes before landing on Gratiot near French.

How the line grew

The company's own timeline shows how a plain salted chip turned into a full snack line.

• 1950s: Wavetts, a wavy chip.
• 1965: popcorn.
• 1970: the purchase of the New Era chip brand.
• 1973: the first flavored chip, barbecue. Sour cream and onion, hot barbecue, sweet barbecue and salt and vinegar followed.
• 1994: the purchase of the Made-Rite Chip Company, which became Better Made North.
• 2008: chocolate-covered potato chips.

The founders lived long enough to see most of it. Peter Cipriano died in 1981 and Cross Moceri in 1984, according to the company. In 2003, Cipriano's heirs bought out the Moceri family's interest, according to a company profile republished by Encyclopedia.com, and the business was soon renamed Better Made Snack Foods. It remains a family company. In a 95th-anniversary post in October 2025, Better Made identified Vice President Phil Gusmano as a third-generation member of the family who started out working in the warehouse.

The scale is bigger than the bag suggests. The Detroit Historical Society puts the plant's volume at more than 60 million pounds of potatoes a year, turned into chips in about seven minutes each. The company points out that Michigan is the country's leading grower of chipping potatoes, and says some of its grower relationships go back to the 1940s.

Most of those potatoes come from Michigan farms. The Encyclopedia.com profile says Better Made buys from Michigan growers for most of the year and fills in from North Dakota and Minnesota when it has to. The workforce is local too. In its 2025 anniversary post, the company said 70 percent of its employees live in Detroit.

What Rainbow chips are

Pick up a bag of Better Made Rainbow and the chips inside are darker than anything else on the rack. The company's own product page nicknames them "Burnt Chips." They are not burnt.

The color comes from sugar in the potato. When a potato with more natural sugar hits hot oil, that sugar caramelizes. The chip darkens and the flavor turns bittersweet. The company explains the history on its own blog. Chip makers used to fry older, sugary table potatoes in direct-fired kettles, and dark chips were common. As farmers moved to low-sugar chipping varieties and plants switched to big continuous fryers, a pale golden chip became the standard and the dark ones became the exception.

At Better Made, the exception was treated as a defect. Workers picked the dark chips off the line. Customers noticed they were gone and asked for the "burnt" chips by name. So the company gathered them up and bagged them separately as Rainbow, though for years there were never enough to go around.

The fix came from the field. Better Made says it worked with potato breeders and farmers to develop a chipping potato with enough sugar to produce Rainbow chips in commercial quantities. Its timeline marks 2005 as the year Rainbow went into semi-mass production and became regularly available.

"Regularly" has limits. The company's FAQ says Rainbow depends on getting potatoes with the right sugar content, and when the crop doesn't cooperate the chips can disappear from stores for anywhere from a few days to a few months. If you see Rainbow on the shelf and you like it, buy two.

The flavors on the shelf now

Better Made's online store lists these potato chip varieties, among others:

• Original, Lightly Salted and No Salt
• Wavy and Krinkle Cut
• Rainbow
• BBQ, Wavy BBQ, Red Hot BBQ, Sweet BBQ, Honey BBQ and Southern Style Sweet Heat BBQ
• Sour Cream & Onion
• Salt & Vinegar
• All Dressed Up

Barbecue alone gets six entries. The chocolate-covered chips are a holiday item. The company's FAQ says it doesn't have cold storage, so it only makes them when the weather is cool enough to keep them from melting.

A few practical notes

• No tours. Better Made says on its FAQ page that it does not offer public tours of the Gratiot plant.
• Allergies. The company describes its facility as completely nut-free, and says most of its chips, potato sticks and popcorn are gluten-free. Read the bag for the specific product.
• Kosher. Most products carry kosher certification, according to the company; the symbol is on the front of the package.

Better Made is in several of our boxes, including The 313 Box ($79) and The Michigan Box ($79), which pairs the chips with Faygo Rock & Rye and Mackinac Island fudge.