Leicester storey of Walker's Oxford Street factory in Leicester. In the early days the potatoes were sliced by hand and cooked in an ordinary fish and chip fryer. In 1971 the Walker's crisps business was sold to Standard Brands, an American firm, who sold on the company to Frito-Lay. Walker's crisps makes 10 million bags of crisps per day at two factories in Beaumont Leys, and is the UK's largest grocery brand. The Beaumont Leys manufacturing plant is world's largest crisp factory. Meanwhile, the sausage and pie business was bought out by Samworth Brothers in 1986. Production outgrew the Cobden Street
No Name (brand) marketing efforts. "Under Nichol's supervision, the country's No Name products have become the largest-selling national brand in Canada, one of the few countries in the world where generic brands compete with well-known names", wrote Maclean's magazine. But according to Nichol, the big name brands were also vulnerable: I happened to come along at a time when the national brands had prostituted the quality of their products. It is so easy to produce products that are superior to almost every national brand. In the 1980s, No Name diverged from its original plain packaging as red lettering and various product illustrations were