You got me to read Wikipedia's discussion of German orthography. Even though my name is German and my Grandparents spoke German, I only learned about umlauts, as that's what was used in our family name [Ü] in place of the English [ue]. The grapheme ß, called Eszett was not discussed in any of the "language lessons" that were taught by Grandparents to children in our family.

I'll have to think more about that but it seems to me to be a stretch to think the symbol on the Reliable chip is some kind of stylized ß. Maybe Mark Bufton has an idea of what the symbol on the chip he is buying means. Maybe he is reading this thread?

Here are some more variants on the Eszett from the Wikipedia article:

And none of them look much like the symbol on the advertising chip.

However, there is a company called www.eszett.biz. They are in Rio and teach classes in foreign languages to companies so not much chance of them doing business with a California engraving company... but not zero chance!