Long Chips Mashed Potato Snack Sea Salt & Vinegar + 2 Other Flavours

The Chef and I waited for our train from Geneva Airport at our usual café and just as we were about to leave I spotted these three flavours of Long Chips: Sea Salt & Vinegar, Original, and Thai Chilli. But there wasn’t any time to get the Swiss francs out; only time for a photograph.

I have since managed to get hold of a packet of the Sea Salt & Vinegar. And what did we think?

Answer: I have no idea what we thought because we never opened the packet. And for some reason this review has been languishing in my drafts folder for four years. I think I will post this anyway. Here’s a website for you to take a look. Lots of flavours I have never seen, and apparently you can buy them from eBay or even Etsy.

I think this is the same crispy snack that the Reluctant Taste Testers tried before. That was a Sour Cream & Chive flavour. It could be the same, but the packaging design has had a bit of a makeover. In fact, it’s totally different. I can only ever remember seeing a packet of Long Chips at Geneva airport, but we haven’t flown anywhere since before Covid and probably never will again, so it’s very possible I will never see another packet. Unless I take a train to Latvia.

Jays Krunchers! Original

This is the final packet of original (or salt) flavour crisps sent by kind Missouri Taste Tester. And just as when I used to get a lot of books out of the library and I always enjoyed the first book the most, and the last book in the pile the least, so with these crisps.

Not nasty, not unpleasant at all, simply not as special as the sensational Cape Cod crisps the Chef and I tried first. Just a nice lightly salted crisp. Out of a big packet.

Interestingly, these crisps smell great in the packet. Some crisps taste great but smell quite nasty. I’ve never worked out how come. But the packet still smells rather good even though all the crisps have been eaten.

If you are looking for a kettle cooked chip that explodes with bold potato flavor and offers a krunchy texture, says the packet, try original Krunchers! Select, premium potatoes are sliced to the ideal thickness and sprinkled with the perfect amount of salt, resulting in a “wow” for your mouth. 

Say goodbye to wimpy chips and BITE into Krunchers!

You’ll probably enjoy them. The Chef did, I know. I’m fairly sure he ate most of these crisps when I wasn’t looking. 

Cape Cod Kettle Chips Original

What a beautiful little crisp this is.

Each crisp is smaller than your average crisp but has just as much, or actually rather more of a crunch than you might expect. With the delightfully simple Original flavour (basically just salt) you get pretty much the perfect crisp. Lovely.

I’m really sorry that the Reluctant Taste Testers aren’t around to share this packet with me. Or perhaps I’m not around to share it with them. But there’s always the Chef and he says he quite likes them.

A kind American friend from Instagram, Missouri Taste Tester, sent me a parcel of crisps and this is the first we have tried. And never even bothered with a dip. Very nice.

As you see; no artificial colours, flavours or preservatives, and no GMO. And 40% less fat than the leading brand of potato chips. I wonder who that is? Apparently the Cape Cod Chips Company is based in Hyannis Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. To be honest that’s a bit of a surprise. Silly me. I thought it was just some marketing strategy. When your hand’s in the bag, your head’s in the cape it says on their website. They have merch!

Snack Jack Broad Bean Snack Original Flavour

I wasn't looking forward to trying this broad bean snack. Noble Friend is very taken with the broad bean snack Habas Fritas that she has learned to love in Spain. She made us try the M&S version and was baffled when I announced myself extremely unimpressed.

So here we go. Actually a bit of a surprise. Not broad bean shaped like haas fritas but sort of crispy worms. Not the (I thought) horrid dull bit of haas fritas but a crispy bite not unlike all manner of maize or corn based snacks the reluctant tasters and I have tried.

And not a bad taste either although a little bit peanutty.

The one not so good element is that the snack is really dry. You know how some crispy snacks are mysteriously much dryer than others? I think this is one of those. Having said that, they are quite moreish. And I think would be a lot more moreish if tried with a drink. By which I mean a glass of wine or something.

Which makes it a bit odd that the packaging design seems to be aimed at children. For some reason I am always quite put off any snack advertised by a cartoon character.

Look, I don't really like a lot of  cartoons. There are exceptions of course. Yakari (a Franco-Belgian cartoon series about a little Native American Indian boy and his pony Petit Tonnere; books and TV in French), Sherlock Yak (a yak detective in a zoo with his assistant Hermine, an ermine; the books are in French, the DVDs of the French/German TV show sadly only available in German), and Grizzy and the Lemmings (not Canadian as you might suppose from the setting, but French and not really in a nay language at all) are my current favourites.

But a giant broad bean with white gloves and boots? What's that about?

And it does seem odd that a snack advertised with a carton bean should be a likely candidate for a bar snack.

Anyway, I think I can confidently say we rather enjoyed this crispy snack.

Fonzies Gli Originali

On a second visit to the Italian deli hard by the Royal Free we failed to buy any pan forte, but found this little bag of cheesy crispy snacks instead. It didn't look a very exciting snack, but I bought it anyway because that's what I do.

These little corn based snacks are very like KP Nik Naks in shape and extremely cheesy, and I thought them rather dry. Dry maybe, but tasty nonetheless.

Thank goodness for Wikipedia which tells me that, as I thought, Fonzies are baked not fried, and can also be found in these other flavours; Time Out, Choco, Hot Passion, Bacon, Hot Chilli, "and others" unspecified. I wonder what flavour Time Out can be?

The fact that Fonzies are exactly the same as the much loved Aussie snack Twisties, caused much excitement on a forum for English expats living in Switzerland (I usually this site useful for information on curtain hooks which are mysteriously completely different in Switzerland from what we are used to in the UK). It seems there are more Australians living in Switzerland than you might think, and they are all thrilled to be able to buy Twisties in Europe.

Twisties seem to be a bit of a phenomenon. Available in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Papua New Guinea and Malaysia, they come in numerous flavours some of which some of which sound a little bit mad. These are the flavours which have been available in Malaysia:

• The Big Cheese
• Yo! Chicken
• Fizz - similar to Australia's Turns Your Tongue Blue! flavour, except with an effervescent effect
• Duh! Tomato
• Whoa! Spicy Garlic
• Kaboom BBQ Curry"
• Chilli Cheese
• Lime Chilli
• Sawadee Thai Sweet Chili
• Super Starz - released as part of a 2012 promotion with Viacom promoting the MTV World Stage music festival in 2012

• Honey BBQ Wings
• Spicy Sausage

• Double Kick - contains two flavours at once, released in 2010

• Bolognese & Cheese Onion
• Chicken Chorizo & Smokey Sausage
• Peppery Jalapeno & Pickle

Coffee Bonanza - limited edition, currently discontinued

My packet of Fonzies tells me Se non ti lecchi le dita good solo a meta. Which means if you don't lick your fingers you only get half the pleasure. Of course that could in fact be said of many crispy snacks. A Twisties packet will tell you that life's pretty straight without Twisties. Not quite the same.

Pringles Original "Perfect Flavour in Every Bite"

I had to go into the hospital yesterday morning for an echo bubble test on my heart (I think that's what they call it), and have a blood pressure monitor fitted. This is horrible. I hate having my blood pressure taken; it's really painful. So I was feeling rather gloomy and in need of cheering up.

Luckily the hospital has a small shop. Quite a nice shop with lots of useful stuff for patients like extra pants and hand cream. It sells a selection of less than healthful drinks and snacks not ideal in a hospital (but also healthy fruit) and lucky for me I spotted some small tubes of Pringles at the back.

Pringles have recently been advertising an updated version of their crispy snacks featuring "perfect flavour in every bite". I don't eat Pringles very often so I honestly cannot remember how patchy, if at all, the flavour was before.  Basically "original" is quite a strong salty taste and as always with Pringles they leave a tingle in your lips. But tasty.

Do beware that this extremely tasty taste comes from 9% of the recommended daily intake of an average adult. And this in a a 40g tub of snacks. Really a lot of salt. But only the plus side; suitable for vegans.

Whether it's the case or not it seemed to me that these updated Pringles are slightly finer than before which I think is an improvement. And the Chef agreed. Certainly there were more broken bits of Pringle in the tube so maybe they are slightly thinner than before. I really do think this gives a nicer snack.

Pringles were recently named and shamed by the Recycling Association because their packaging is almost impossible to recycle. I see you can recycle the plastic lid but the metallic/card tube must be a nightmare. Come on Kellogg's, you bought this brand is 2012. Isn't it time to redesign the tube?

Back to the hospital today for a 72 hour heart scan. Oh joy.

Golden Fluff Potato Flutes Original Flavour

Yesterday we tried barbecue flavour Potato Flutes, today original flavour. Which basically means it tastes of nothing very much at all.

But nothing very much in a wonderfully tasty way. Deliciously nothingy. I liked this crispy snack a lot. Very nice indeed.

The reluctant taste testers were happy to polish off this 14g (half an ounce) bag in no time at all.

I'd like to applaud Golden Fluff for their lovely potato flutes. It's a great crispy snack and should be used more often. I don't think we have a native version of this style of snack. Golden Fluff snacks are made in the USA.

Lay's Hamka's Original

Dutch taste tester's sister (also Dutch) (obviously) came to visit with her husband (he's also Dutch) and brought a pile of exciting (Dutch) treats with her. Including this very exciting packet of crisps (which are Dutch).

I often peer over Dutch taste tester's shoulder as she lusts after Dutch treats on Dutch websites (in Dutch); it seems you just can't buy Dutch goodies in this country. No, not even in London. Not what Dutch taste tester really wants, anyway. I had picked these crisps as something to lust after myself. And lo! here they are.

Wow! Much bigger than I was expecting. A whole mouthful all at once. Not a crisp at all of course, because it's made of maize, so more of a crispy snack in a similar sort of style to Monster Munch but in a checkerboard pattern. And not a scary Monster Munch style flavour.

Rather a smokey flavour to start off with, but more and more moreish as you have another, and yet another. In fact, very tasty. Sort of hammy, and sort of cheesy. And a lovely light crunch. Very nice.

So many thanks to Dutch taste tester's sister.

Golden Fluff Potato Zagz Original

This little bag contains only 60 calories! This little bag contains only 3g of fat. Huzzah! Sounds awfully healthy doesn't it?

This little bag contains only 14g of extruded potato snacks. Of which 3g is fat. Not so healthy then. And less than 1g of fibre. Again, not so healthy. It rather sounds as though the healthiest thing about this little bag of crispy snacks is that it's very small indeed.

This little bag contains a rather boring not very crispy, not very tasty snack. I'm disappointed and the reluctant taste testers were too. Golden Fluff can definitely do better than this. The bite is a bit heavy, the texture's not right and frankly we've tried a dozen tastier lightly salted snacks. Perhaps this natural flavour is supposed to have no salt at all? In which case it fails: 125mg or 6% of your daily recommended allowance.

Just stop what you're doing and grab a zag or two! Crispy, crunchy, crinkly, rippling with fresh potato flavour. Guaranteed - two won't do! says the packet. Hmmn.

Well I don't know. I think I'd sooner have something a little bit less "healthy".

I read online that an orange (fruit chosen at random) contains about 60 calories (maybe - different websites give different answers but let's run with this), and 0.1g of fat. The orange contains no salt and 2g or so of fibre. Of course it also has 9g of sugar. But think of the calories you use battling your way in through the skin.

If you haven't yet read it, you might like to take a look at my recent post on "healthy snacks". Which mostly really aren't.

Kims Ostepops Original

History Graduate taste tester went to Denmark & Sweden for the weekend, as you do, and brought home this totally amazing packet of cheesy corn puffs.

Når du er sulten for sjov... says the packet: hungry for the fun of it (translates the website).

Little curly bright orange maize snacks with a superb cheesy taste. Extravagantly cheesy. The reluctant taste testers and I were not prepared for just how fabulous this crispy snack was going to be.

Made by Danish firm Kims along the lines of the good old British staple the cheesy Wotsit these corn puffs look pretty much like what we choose to think of as "the original" corn puff. But they don't cover your fingers in bright orange flavour dust that takes days to fade.

Of course, in other parts of the world one might say they are much like Cheetos. But as I haven't had too much exposure to Cheetos I will continue with the Wotsits theme.

And they taste better than Wotsits! Better even, I venture to suggest, than M&S Full on Flavour Cheese Tasters which are pretty good.

Amazing. And wow! And we all liked these a lot. Delicious.
This is intended to be a rave review. I hope you can tell.

I think we are all going to have to visit Denmark to pick up more crispy snacks from Kims.

I'm not wild about the packaging design though.

Sunchips Original 100% Whole Grain

A suspiciously healthy-looking crispy snack this, exported especially for us by kind bloggy friend Betsy.

And I guess they must be healthy because they're labelled Heart Healthy and made with 100% whole grain; that's whole corn, whole wheat, brown rice flour and whole oat flour. There are no artificial flavours or preservatives and also there's 30% less fat than in a regular potato chip.

At Sunchips we believe that being different is good. That's why we created Sunchips with a mission to provide tasty one of a kind snacks that take afternoon snacking from ho-hum to oh yeah!

Everyone's favourite whole grain chip. It's slightly savory, slightly sweet and totally 100% original. 

Well, that's what the packaging tells me. And despite the aggressively healthy look to them, this wavy crispy snack is pretty tasty. And we did enjoy them.

You get a great big hit of salt first of all, and then the sugar. And the crunch is just right. So not bad. Not bad at all.

Original Ritz Crackers

When I was little my Granny & Grandpa used to have Ritz Crackers at about 6 o'clock each evening with a very small whisky and soda. By today's standards they were extremely abstemious and somehow this evening ceremony seemed very special. A daily treat.

This is Winifred (sometimes known as Goff) and Hugh (always called Tommy) in the 1950s. Actually it might be my parents' wedding.

Anyway, here we have the basic Ritz biscuit. It seems to taste exactly the same as ever it did. I wonder if the recipe is the same? Quite salty. But quite sweet at the same time. A gentle flavour; not exciting.

Oven baked not fried it says on the box. Maybe. But is it probable that this little biscuit was ever fried? That doesn't seem terribly likely does it? And not terribly impressed that these little biscuits are made with palm oil. But perhaps they always were.

Nice to try for a change. But I think they'd be tastier with cream cheese and something or maybe some pâté.

Willards Thingz Siesta Snack Original

I was looking for something quite un-crisp related on Amazon when it did that thing of recommending a product you find yourself unable to resist. Oh no! A packet of crisps called Thingz from Zimbabwe.

Well! Knowing that I will never visit Zimbabwe (never say never but it does seem wildly unlikely) I thought why not? And thanks to the annoyingly efficient Amazon Prime delivery system here they are.

So, you're a crispy snack company based in Zimbabwe, and for the hard of geography readers that's in Southern Africa (alright, I know you knew that), and naturally you decide on a Mexican theme for your snack. Why not?

Thingz (says the packaging) the Spicy Siesta Snack for Desperados! And the Desperado has presumably gorged himself on Thingz and fallen into a deep slumber under the shade of his Mexican hat and a selection of Saguaro cactuses such as you might find in Southern Arizona and Western Sonora in Mexico.

But oh dear, what a disappointment. I offered these puffed corn rings to the reluctant taste testers, to the Chef and even the Chef's brother. And none of us like them.

I think the taste is sort of curry-ish (but not in a good way) and there's a hint of something from my childhood that I can't put my finger on (and not in a good way either).  You can't tell what the flavour might be aside from "spicy" because the packet simply says flavouring. I can only suppose, given the packaging design, it must be meant to be a sort of Mexican chilli.

And the texture doesn't have a light bubbly crunch as you might suppose, but degenerates quickly into cotton wool. Which then glues itself to your teeth in an unpleasant fashion.

Sorry, but we are not impressed.

I tried to find out more about this crispy snack but beyond the fact that it seems to be called Willards Thingz (confusingly Willards does not appear on the packet at all), there's not a lot I could find. Nothing about Cairns Foods either. The link to Cairns Foods on the packet defaulted to a site called Thousand Military (very odd) with links to Nespresso Expresso, Military jobs, Food Industry jobs in Canada and Dubai and Nursing jobs in Zimbabwe. Very very odd indeed.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet search engine I did discover that Zimbabweans eat a lot of corn snacks but nothing about their preferred flavours. Except Willards also produce Cheas Naks, a cheese flavoured corn chip, and Flings (flavour unknown).

I have no idea at all if Mexican food is popular. But you never know.

Sudden thought: what a shame Thingz aren't cactus-shaped.

Unfortunately this giant 150g packet is too large to fit into my scanner. But it does feature a little guy throwing his rubbish away responsibly so here he is, on the back of the packet, plus a lot of cactuses.

KP Hula Hoops

I tried a selection packet of Hula Hoops.

I hadn't had a Hula Hoop for years so it was interesting to try them again. We used to have them all the time and for some reason it seemed really cool to put a hoop on to the end of each finger and then eat them off my fingers - instead of just eating them out of the packet. Of course that was a long long time ago.

And guess what? They taste just as I remember. And also guess what? Apparently everyone else in the world used to eat Hula Hoops off the ends of their fingers. Well well.

It turns out that although there is nothing at all the matter with Hula Hoops I find I'm not terrifically impressed. Perhaps it's because they seem to be exactly the same as they were back in 1973 which is of course a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... But in 1973 we didn't have such a wealth of crispy snacks to choose from. Or indeed so many fascinating flavours to try.

I read on the website that Hula Hoops currently come in BBQ Beef, Cheese and Onion, Original, Salt and Vinegar, Roast Chicken, Smokey Bacon, Sour Cream and Chive, and Sweet Chili flavours. I haven't actually seen most of these as our local Waitrose has quite a small crispy snack section and tends not to stock the more exciting flavours. This multipack has Cheese and Onion, Original and Salt and Vinegar; the classics.

Hula Hoop Facts: did you know it would take over 250 million Hula Hoops to weigh the same as the Angel of the North! Hula Hoops in a hole world of their own. Not, I have to say, something I had ever considered but you never know what thrilling info will be printed on the back of a crisp packet.

I started with Cheese and Onion. The cheese and onion-ness is quite pleasant. Not too strong, not too oniony, but weirdly you can suck the cheese and onion flavour off and then you just have an original flavour Hula Hoop.

And then I moved on to Original. Quite tasty, a little bit salty, not very exciting but OK. As always, quite a hard crunch. And of course these crunchy potato snacks are little hoops. What else? Not convinced I would want to eat more than a very small bag at one sitting but perfectly good as a crispy crunchy snack.

Finally Salt and Vinegar. Which is a little bit too sharp for my taste. A little bit too vinegary. Not too bad but I far prefer the Original flavour. In fact I'm inclined to think that Original is best.

I can see why they still sell of course. These small multi pack bags seem to be aimed at the packed lunch market. Little children (and let's admit it, not so little children too) will always enjoy eating them off the ends of their fingers.