George Crum, what did you start?

In 1853, you got in a huff with a fussy customer in your Saratoga Springs, N.Y., restaurant, tossed some thinly cut potatoes in a pot of oil and fried them to a crisp.

What emerged from the kettle were potato chips and the start of a snack- food phenomenon with annual sales of more than $6 billion.

Today the snack racks in supermarkets, groceries and carryouts are lined with chips - familiar flavors such as barbecue and sour cream and onion, and increasingly new, exotic recipes such as yogurt and green onion, salsa with mesquite and herbes de Provence.

Snack lovers can get their chips kettle-cooked, fried or baked, rippled or smooth, with skins or without, with salt and without, in reduced-fat versions or regular.

All the tinkering is an effort to boost the popularity of a food that even the manufacturers say the public doesn't need.

"Chip are a fun food," said Ann Wilkes of the Snack Food Association. "It's not a staple. People are looking for excitement and flavor."

Because chip purchases are often spur-of-the-moment decisions, producers are always looking for new ways to attract customers.

Bolder flavors, thicker slices, more healthful ingredients are part of the effort to win over consumers' taste buds. And the tactics seem to be working. Last year, Americans consumed 1.85 billion pounds of potato chips - about 6.6 pounds per person compared with 5.6 pounds per person in 1995, Wilkes said.

The idea of adding flavor to potato chips came more than 100 years after Crum's invention. In 1954, someone got the notion of adding barbecue spices to the chips and the world began to change. Soon there were sour cream and onion chips and Chesapeake Bay crab chips.

Recently the flavors have also gotten more specific. Now there not only is barbecue, there is also mesquite barbecue and North Carolina barbecue and Applewood barbecue.

"Hot and spicy seems to be popular now," Wilkes said.

Some chips aren't made from potatoes at all, but from vegetables such as parsnips, carrots, beets, rutabagas and taro root.

Emily Marcovitz of Owings Mills is a fan of Terra Blue, potato chips that are, well, blue.

"I think they are kind of sweet," said Marcovitz, who picked up a bag at Trader Joe's in Towson. "They are very crispy. I just love them."

Ellen Thompson, gourmet merchandising manager for Eddie's of Roland Park, is partial to the Route 11 sweet potato chips. "I can eat a whole bag in one sitting," she said. "I don't like sharing."

Overall, plain potato chips are still the favorite, accounting for 55 percent of all chips sold last year, Wilkes said, but that is down from 62 percent of the market in 1997.

"People's taste are changing," she said. "Our tastes are getting more sophisticated. ... We want more different and exciting flavors."

Herr's Potato Chips in Nottingham, Pa., is constantly looking for new flavors. The company offers 17 different kinds of potato chips, some flat, some contoured, low-salt, thick-cut. Flavors range from barbecue to cheddar, sour cream and dill.

The list is constantly changing, said Daryl Thomas, Herr's director of marketing. "People like change. It brings something exciting and new to the brand."

Ideas for new chips come from employees, customers, visitors to the company's plant and competitors, Thomas said.

A panel of experts weighs the ideas and small batches are taste-tested in the company's visitor center. It can take a couple of months to a year for a new flavor to become a reality. Even then, some flavors don't work. The company discontinued its bacon-cheddar chip for lack of interest.

Still, Thomas estimates 90 percent success rate for the chips it introduces.

Utz, the No. 1 chip maker in the Baltimore-Washington area, has taken a more sanguine approach, however. "We are aware that some of our competitors have come up with all kinds of flavors," said company spokesman Gary Laabs. "We don't see any great new successes."

Still, the company produces 20 kinds of chips, including Kettle Classic chips, cooked in peanut oil; Grandma's chips, cooked in lard; and Home-style chips, cooked in soybean oil. Utz chip flavors include Salt and Vinegar, Carolina BBQ, Chesapeake Crab, and its new Fiesta Cheese.

"We want to satisfy as many of our customers as possible, but we don't want to jump on anything that comes down the road," Laabs said. "We'll watch the market and when we realize there is something the consumers do like, we'll come out with our version of what that may be."

None of the new flavors much changes the basic makeup of potato chips, which contain about 150 calories and 9 grams of fat for a serving of 20 chips. But not all chips are created equal, as some of the gourmet chips, made in small batches, can cost more than twice as much as a bag of plain chips from Utz or Frito-Lay.

For example, thickly sliced Culinary chips, which come in flavors such as Herbes de Provence, sell for $3.99 for a 5-ounce bag compared with $1.49 for a 6-ounce bag of Utz chips.

The strategy of creating new and exotic flavors is one reason smaller chip businesses like Poore Brothers of Phoenix have thrived. The company was started by two brothers who learned how to make kettle chips in 1986 and today is a publicly traded company with a 10 to 15 percent share of its market, thanks to chips with exotic flavors such as jalapeno, habanero, pesto and garlic parmesan.

"We want a smaller percentage of the population, but those who will eat more," said chief executive officer Eric Kufel.

But the experiments in flavor aren't only for small start-ups. The county's largest chip maker, Frito-Lay, makes 26 kinds of potato chips in the United States and recently began searching the country for new flavors to highlight.

Devising a contest loosely modeled on the Miss America beauty pageant, the company asked consumers to vote for their favorite regional flavors to replace the current reigning champions - California Dill and Memphis BBQ.

The chips in contention: Coney Island Hot Dog, Wisconsin Cheddar, Maui Onion and New Orleans Cajun Gumbo. The winners will be announced next month and stay on the shelves for a few months before new flavors replace them, said company spokeswoman Lynn Markley.

"Because potato chips are a spontaneous purchase for most people, you've got to keep it interesting," Markley said. "You've got to please the variety-seeking consumer."