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CHIPS AHOY!

Say Hello To The Brave New World Of Niche And Regional Snack Food Flavours.

Text: AMY ROSEN
Photos: HAROLD FORTIN

1 | 2 | Nov '04

I bought the wrong chips. I was prone on the couch mowing down an oversize bag of Lay’s, when I suddenly realized the potato chips weren’t my usual ketchup flavour at all. They were cheesy. Oddly cheesy. I had grabbed a bag of Québec Four Cheese chips from the Lay’s Tastes of Canada series. In recent months, you might have noticed similarly-labelled bags of Whistler Cool Dill, Wild Stampede BBQ and P.E.I. Loaded Baked Potato chips on store shelves, too. Some actually tasted good, but what I liked even more was the idea that our regional taste preferences trickle right down to the base level of a new snack flavour.

We are a snack-crazed nation, with tastes completely distinct from our neighbours to the south and across the pond. For instance, Americans tend to eat chips on the side with lunch, and so prefer plain. As evening snackers, Canadians favour flavoured chips. British pub-goers eat lorries full of meal-substitute crisps, like chicken tikka or roast beef and mustard. The hyperspeed Japanese culture seems to turn out trendy potato chip sensations almost weekly, like takoyaki (octopus dumpling) and niwatori no nankotsu age (fried chicken cartilage).

The regional flavour idea actually started in the 1970s with Flavours of the World chips, like French Onion. More recently, Lay’s launched Tastes of America a year before the Canadian promotion, and also offers British and Australian versions. Dale Hooper, VP of marketing for Frito Lay Canada, tells me that pretty much everyone around the world has a spin on it now. “After 9-11, there was a re-emergence of patriotism and people were looking at what is uniquely Canadian,” says Hooper. “People wanted things that celebrated their area or region, and that doesn’t have to be a specific flavour as much as a combination of an idea and a flavour.” So while dill pickle isn’t necessarily indigenous to Whistler, creamy cool dill feels right for that chilled-out area. “The magic is in finding the flavour that romances an area and culture but is also mainstream enough that the broader population will love it,” says Hooper.

Ten years ago, you never could have imagined your corner pub dishing out wasabi peas, yet the potato chip is still the number one snack crunch. It celebrated its 150th anniversary last year and remains the lowest common denominator of cultural dissemination, bringing research and innovations in consumer tastes and marketing to the masses. But in an era when trends move faster than it takes a hungry kid to polish off a bag of Doritos, what does it take to bring a new potato chip flavour to the table?

Our global hunger for new snack-food experiences means flavourists are hunkered down in gleaming laboratories around the world, trying to come up with the next big thing. (Quite a change from the chip’s humble beginnings when George Crum, a cook in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., thinly sliced some potatoes and fried them up in the summer of 1853.) Then they take their findings to Snaxpo, which is how I find myself in Philadelphia at the annual summit meeting of snack flavour gurus.

The world’s largest trade show for the snack-food industry is a mélange of red carpeting and prefab booths, where conventioneers are cutting deals on everything from conveyor belts and snack extruders (you know, that machine that squeezes your cheesies into that elongated peanut shape) to packaging and seasonings. It is here that new flavours are bought and packaged for consumers – or flop.

1 | 2 | Nov '04