If you’re looking for that new potato chip that won the Lay’s “Do Us A Flavor” contest, we’re not going to lie—they’re getting hard to find. Reasor’s, QuikTrip, even Dollar General—they’re trying hard to keep them in stock.
And it’s no wonder; the new “Bacon Grilled Cheese” chip was the winner chosen out of more than 700,000 entries, and it happens to come from right here in Sapulpa, Oklahoma.
Paula George, the winner of the contest, has already been featured in news reports all around the country, and she said the last several days have just been “euphoric.”
“I couldn’t sleep, I had a hard time just functioning, it was just surreal,” she said. “I actually woke up the next morning and asked my husband, ‘Did I just dream that?'”
But her husband assured her, it was all real. And the process seemed almost more about persistence than pure luck. George said she submitted numerous recipes before sending the one that landed her the million-dollar prize.
“I submitted a couple a day for a couple of months, sometimes three or four a day, I don’t remember how many, but I submitted all kinds of stuff,” she said. “I had lost my dad, and was going through the grieving process, and those Lay’s entries took my mind off of grieving and put it on creativity.”
She said the winning recipe—her dad’s very own “Bacon Grilled Cheese”—is the one she suspected would win anyway, because of the meaning behind it.
“He’s an Oklahoman, you know how we are about our fried foods and stuff,” she said. “My dad used to take the bacon and he’d fry up the bacon and then he’d layer the sandwich and then fry the sandwich in bacon grease. And whenever I had a problem or something, dad would grill up some sandwiches or whatever, and we’d just sit and talk it through.”
George says that the process of submitting that recipe reminded her of what she’d lost with her dad’s passing. “The night I (submitted that recipe), I realized that I wouldn’t get to do that anymore. And I asked (husband) Jason to make me the sandwich because I was really grieving hard and he did.”
It was at that point that Paula George decided this recipe would be a special one. “I said, ‘I’m gonna write about dad and I’m gonna win.'”
She said that when her husband Jason read the entry, he had tears in his eyes. “He said, ‘win or lose, baby, dad will be so proud of this entry,’ and that was how that one came about.”
In the 20-minute interview, Paula George talked more about her family adventures, from Raising Wilder to what they plan to do with the winnings. First on the list? Shop local.
“I’m going to shop Sapulpa,” she said. “I want to encourage everyone to go shop Dewey, have lunch at The Cookery, and shop some of those amazing, cute shops we have in town,” she said.
She also mentioned plans to buy a small farm and take in teenagers that are “not adoptable.”
“I was a social worker for 12 years and we had a hard time placing those kids, and they would just say, ‘all I want is a family,’ and so I want to have a small farm and make take in some of those kids and just give them love.”
She said until she won this contest, she thought a dream that big could never happen, but thanks to this contest and the support of her hometown, she sees it as a real possibility. “You start thinking that every dream you’ve ever had is within your grasp,” she said. “It’s within your reach.”
We’ve embedded the full interview below. You can also find it on the Sapulpa Times YouTube Channel.
