Popular Virginia-based Route 11 Potato Chips’ colorful origins and delicious partnership with Quail Cove Farms in Machipongo
By Betsy DiJulio
Every business needs a good creation story, especially if it involves cocaine dealers. Wait, what?
According to Sarah Cohen, founder and president of Route 11 Potato Chips, the legend goes something like this: At one time, her parents (the late Edward and Fritzi Cohen) owned The Tabard Inn and Restaurant in Washington, D.C., which remains in the family.
Interested in where food comes from in the days before the proliferation of farmers markets, Edward started a farm in Warren County, near Front Royal, c. 1980, where he grew vegetables for his kitchen and for other D.C. chefs.
Through this business offshoot, he met an organic farmer who, unwittingly, had just planted potatoes for a pair of cocaine dealing brothers hoping to launder their ill-gotten gains with spuds instead of suds. They were busted, got locked up, and the farmer was left with a crop for which he had no customer.
Edward’s response was “Let’s make potato chips,” and the rest is history. He found an Amish chip factory in Pennsylvania to make the first batches but soon opened his own operation in southern Maryland giving birth to Tabard Farm Potato Chips.
When the company received an order for some 6,000 tubs of chips from Williams-Sonoma, Sarah was recruited to help with the family business. With a background in the hotel and restaurant fields, her response after about a year was, “I could keep doing this; just not in Maryland.”
So, she loaded up a truck and set up shop in Middletown, Virginia, renamed the company Route 11, and has been making small-batch kettle-cooked potato chips since 1992. In 2008, the company settled into its state-of-the-art facility in Mount Jackson, where she and 53 employees continue to build on the company’s roots.
Their focus is on community, sustainability, and making the best tasting, most golden and finest curling and crunching potato chips possible.
A herd of local cattle feed on both the potato peelings and chip rejects, while even the dirt off the potatoes is recycled. A white roof reflects the sun and helps keep this spotlessly clean and largely green factory cool during steamy Virginia summers.
Sarah sources potatoes as locally as possible, and Bill Jardine, owner of Quail Cove Farms in Machipongo, is one of her farmer partners. Bill reconnected with Sarah in the mid-1990s at a food show in Baltimore, having met her and her father previously.
At the time, sweet potato chips weren’t “a thing,” but Bill, who has been farming organically for about 30 years, brought her some sweet potatoes to try, they cooked up a batch, and the question of the day was, “Why isn’t anyone doing this?” It may be because “sweets” are finicky.
“They are more complicated than chipping potatoes,” as Sarah explains. “They are wilier…it’s hard to get a grip on them.”
But Bill’s are “phenomenal,” a result of the TLC he shows to the soil and the plants in the form of cover crops like rye and amendments like blackstrap molasses and seaweed.
According to Bill, a biology major and former chemical salesman, the molasses helps bacteria in the soil multiply faster and seaweed “has a lot of plant hormones; it helps the plant get moving.” These aren’t secrets, he notes, “but not all do it.”
Sarah buys up all the sweet potatoes Bill can provide and sources the rest to keep up with demand.
Over the years, Bill has experimented with a lot of varieties but has narrowed it down to four that he considers uniformly good. Still, they have to be kept separate because cooking requirements must be tailored to each variety’s specific properties.
Sarah says she feels “lucky and blessed” to have this partnership with Bill—whom she calls a “great human”—because not only are they “sensitive to what is good for each other,” but “if you get something amazing, it will come out in the chips.”
While the Route 11 factory is semi-automated, Sarah explains that “a real human is overseeing the process,” as “you need someone’s eyes on it” to ensure the chips come out of the kettle at the right time. “There’s a certain touch you can’t get with automation,” she asserts. Even so, “Humidity is not your friend.”
So, while Route 11 formerly marketed sweet potato chips year-round, these seasonal favorites are now only available October to April or May because, “It is difficult to cook them well when it is hot out.”
You can put your own eyes on the chip-making process Monday through Saturday, 9 to 5, through large viewing windows in the factory’s retail center where Route 11 merch and, of course, chips are for sale.
In the meantime, you can buy chips year-round at Taste locations, Whole Foods, Costco, and Quail Cove Farms, among other retailers. Come October, the fleeting sweets will join the other eight unique flavors on store shelves.
From seedy characters to sweet success, the Route 11 creation story is the stuff of homegrown legends.
Learn more at rt11.com or quailcovefarms.com.
Betsy DiJulio
Betsy DiJulio is a full-time art teacher, artist and curator with side hustles as a freelance writer, including for Coastal Virginia Magazine, and a vegan recipe developer, food stylist and photographer. Learn more on her website thebloomingplatter.com.
