Red Sky West Country Bacon & Cream Cheese

These crisps advertise themselves as entirely natural with all natural ingredients and bunnies and moles helping to pick the potatoes.

The packaging is very pretty, showing a homeward bound tractor silhouetted against a red summer sunset (red sky at night shepherd's delight); there are swallows and swifts in the sky and the barn or farmhouse has a weather vane on the roof. All very rural.

"Nature's promise of a glorious day" it says, and "Supporting the Prince's Countryside Fund"; I assume that is Prince Charles's fund, and "Let's make sure our countryside stays pleasant and green".

And very nice too.

Oh yes, and don't forget to throw your rubbish away carefully because that protects the countryside too. The throwing rubbish away man doesn't usually get to wear a hat so this is rather a fine example.

The smell is rather plain (pretty good in fact) but there's no sense of the bacon & cream cheese flavour. And the bite and crunch is fine. And what do they look like? Pretty normal for a crisp. Not very large but a good golden colour.

But oh dear. The 100% Great Taste, with 100% Natural Seasonings really isn't very nice at all. I do get the bacon taste on first bite but it's a bacon that's been sitting in the fridge for far too long and gone off. Yuk. The after-taste is better by far but after one crunch into that off-tasting crisp you don't want to attempt another. I did try several more because I was searching for the cream cheese. Couldn't find it.

Lucky thing these crisps were on special offer. Or could that be, no wonder these crisps were on special offer?  What a disappointment.

Red Sky crisps are made by Walkers, who of course are owned by PepsiCo. The packet encourages me to look at the website www.redskysnacks.co.uk where I can let Red Sky know what I think. No I can't. It's one page with a picture of the same red sunset and a postal address (as already spotted on the packet) and that's it. You even get this link on the PepsiCo site. PepsiCo also advise me I could have looked on Twitter or YouTube but I slightly lost the will to live. And no use looking on the Walkers website because that's all about Gary's Great Ingredient Hunt just now.

The Prince's Countryside Fund has quite an interesting website though.

There are two other Red Sky flavours that I've not tried yet but to be honest I'm not sure I really want to. Although I must admit I have always had my doubts about ham - and bacon is essentially a species of ham - as a flavouring for crisps. Perhaps I started in the wrong place? With the wrong flavour I mean. I don't know. Perhaps pioneering food writers (that's me!) must suffer for their art.

I do like the plane pulling the slogan along.


Verdict: surprisingly nasty. I wanted to like them but I couldn't.