Popchips Original

Product name: Popchips Original
Purchase details: £0.99 for an 85g bag (tesco.com)
Calories: 95 per 23g serving (351 per bag)
Country of origin: Europe

Since it’s been nearly a year since my first and only review of Popchips, to date, I thought it was about time I cracked on with some of the other flavours! For this post, I will be going back to basics with the Original variety.

These Popchips came in a cool blue bag that had the same overall style as the Barbeque version. However, this was a bigger packet that was supposed to contain at least 3.5 servings of around 19 chips. I’m sorry, but I didn’t get the point of that – surely it would be better to make it serve either three or four rather than somewhere in the middle? (I had enough spare calories for the whole pack but that wasn’t the point!)

Issues of logic aside, I was really quite keen to get tucked into these. The discs looked the same as the Barbeque ones, too, but without the red powder. I also found my mouth watering, once more, at the smell of the crisps – it was surprisingly powerful despite essentially just smelling of salt and potato! There also seemed to be a slight oily element to this which may have been down to the sunflower oil they’d been popped in.

Unlike Walkers Pops: Original, these chips were simply flavoured with sea salt and contained no additional flavourings. For that reason, they were much more like your traditional ready salted crisps. However, the level of starchiness in their potato flavour reminded me of something even more specific: Walkers French Fries. Despite being plain, I didn’t find these Popchips tasted boring and, if anything, I sometimes found them a bit too salty on the back of my tongue.

The chips felt a tiny bit greasy between the fingers but, aside from that, their texture was the same great one that the Barbeque variety had.

One minor criticism was that the bag these Popchips came in was far too big for the contents but, thankfully, this was deceptive as there were a lot more crisps in there than it first appeared. Furthermore, despite being lighter than most normal crisps, these Popchips still felt like a real treat...one I’d happily buy again.

Appearance: 7.5/10
Aroma: 7.5/10
Taste: 7/10
Texture: 8/10
Overall score: 7.5/10