Nine Kettle Chips, Tasted Blind

Brand loyalty on crisps is strong and mostly unearned. So we bought nine kettle-cooked bags at full retail, poured them into unmarked bowls, and had five people rank them without knowing what anything was.

No brand was contacted. Every bag was bought by us.

How we scored

Each taster rated three things out of five: crunch, salt balance, and potato flavour. Then, separately, we counted which bowls emptied. That last number turned out to be the interesting one.

What the scores said

The two most expensive bags scored highest on potato flavour and lowest on salt. The cheapest bag scored highest on salt and lowest on everything else.

Crunch clustered tightly. Seven of the nine were within half a point of each other, which suggests kettle-cooking is a fairly solved problem and the differences people describe are mostly in seasoning.

What the empty bowls said

The bowl that emptied first was not the highest-scored bag. It was a mid-price own-brand that scored third on flavour and first on salt.

This gap between "rated best" and "eaten most" showed up in every round. People rate restraint and eat salt. Anyone making buying decisions from scores alone is measuring the wrong thing.

Notes worth keeping

Bag fill varies enormously. Two bags of the same stated weight had visibly different volumes of chips, and the fuller one felt like better value even though it was not.

Broken pieces are not a quality signal. The bag with the most fragments also scored second on crunch. Breakage is about handling in transit, not about the chip.

Seasoned varieties are hard to compare. We limited this to plain and sea salt for that reason. A salt and vinegar chip beats everything on first bite and loses by the tenth.

Where we would spend

For eating out of a bowl at a table, the mid-price own-brand won on the only measure that matters, which is that it disappeared.

For serving with something, the expensive ones justified themselves: firmer, less salty, and they did not compete with a dip.

For eating alone out of the bag, buy whichever is on offer. Under those conditions nobody in our group could reliably identify their usual brand.

The honest conclusion

We went in expecting to find a clear winner and found a clear split instead. The chip you rate and the chip you finish are different chips, and most crisp reviews only measure the first one.

Some links on this page earn a commission. We paid retail for all nine bags and no brand saw this before publication.