In our Taste Test series, BA editors conduct blind comparisons to discover the best supermarket staples (like vanilla ice cream or frozen pizza). Today, which potato chip will satisfy your crunchiest cravings?
What’s not to love about potato chips? They’re cheap, easy to find, and gloriously junk-foody. A potato chip’s delicate, salty crunch is the quintessential snack on its own. But added to a sandwich, for instance, or even boosted by complementary seasonings and dips, it alchemizes, transforming into something greater than the sum of its parts.
There are seemingly endless brands and genres of potato chips to choose from. Would you prefer baked or fried? With ruffles or without? Does a kettle cooked chip sound appealing? Which oil would you prefer your chip to be fried in? The veritable mountain of options is overwhelming. To narrow down our taste test, we focused solely on potato chips that were classically fried; that means excluding baked, kettle cooked, and flavored chips—we love them, but we’re focusing on the original formula here.
We tasted seven of the most popular potato chip brands to evaluate their texture, crunch, balance of salt and oil, and earthy potato flavor.
Photograph by Alex Huang
The Biggest Letdown: Wise
The specs: Wise chips were made with the usual combination of frying oils (corn, cottonseed, sunflower, soybean, or canola), and its nutrition facts don’t reveal any notable anomalies. Based on its production, it’s hard to nail down why this one might have been disappointing—perhaps it was made without love?
The verdict: If you’re looking for a life-affirming potato chip with a crispy, crackling crunch and a vibrant ping of saltiness in each bite…keep looking. Wise chips were a disappointment to our tasters. Editorial operations associate Kate Kassin likened the lingering, chemical-tinted taste to “toxic waste,” and senior cooking editor Emma Laperruque made note of an old, stale oil smell and taste. Finding a pairing for the Wise potato chips was tough.
