Chips Ahoy!

Chips Ahoy! is a brand of cookie, baked and marketed by Nabisco, a subsidiary of Mondelez International, that debuted in 1963. It is widely sold in the United States, Latin America (where its name in some countries is "Choco Chips"), South Africa, Canada, Latvia, Spain, Portugal, China, Indonesia, Taiwan, Mauritius, United Kingdom, Italy and many more regions. It is marketed in varieties of 1 ounce (28 g) mini-sized cookie packages to around 48 ounces (1,400 g) packages of standard-sized cookies. It is the third best-selling cookie in the United States after Oreo, also a Nabisco-branded cookie, with an average of US$619.4 million in sales per year. By the 1980s, several different varieties of the cookie snack were being baked and shipped to grocery stores: chewy, sprinkled, and striped. In Indonesia, Chips Ahoy! was relaunched in September 2015 after the product was discontinued in that country in the early 2010s.

Nabisco says the name is "a reference to the nautical term, Ships Ahoy!". The words "Chips Ahoy!" also feature prominently in a story appearing in Chapter 15 of "The Uncommercial Traveller", by Charles Dickens. Dickens relays a childhood tale of a shipwright, named Chips, who is taunted by a diabolical talking rat who predicts the sinking of Chips's ship: "Chips ahoy! Old boy! We've pretty well eat them too, and we'll drown the crew, and will eat them too!". There is also a 1956 American animated theatrical short titled Chips Ahoy....read more