03.16.09

Road Kill in a Bag

Posted in Reviews, Greatest Hits, Other Fun at 12:10 pm by Chef Matt

As a business, it is generally a good idea to “involve” your customers in the development of your product. It’s not only a good way to receive feedback about your product, but it’s also a great way to update your database with contact information on your customers so you can send them more ads.

You’re in the band now blue. You’re welcome.

Probably the most notable example of this that I can recall is when M&M’s had the election for a new color M&M. They did this twice actually, once in 1995 (blue won) and again in 2002 (purple won). Anyway, hundreds of thousands of people voted - and M&M/Mars got all their info. How brilliant. It made the customers think they had a stake in shaping the future of the candy that tastes the same no matter what color it is, and now M&M’s could do much more targeted marketing to their customer base.

How could you vote against them?… photo ©Cecilia Pollak

When I worked at WWF, I helped do “voting” campaigns as well where people voted on their favorite animal (polar bear won), the cutest animal (panda won), and even the scariest animal (around Halloween - I forget which animal won). People had a lot of fun with it, and it helped us gather information on people who were interested in the work we were doing to protect endangered species.

So it was with great interest that I discovered Walkers Crisps (potato chips) is doing a campaign to pick a new flavor of potato chip over here in the UK. They had people suggest new flavors, then they developed a select set of them, and now they sell bags of these trial flavors that you can vote on through their website or by sending them a text message. Once again, it’s a truly brilliant campaign.

But as you are likely a regular reader of this blog, you know there is a big “however” that has to come in as part of this story. And yes, there is. The flavors they have developed are - for the most part - really quite disappointing and/or disturbing. I have tried them all at this point, and so I deliver now the list with some quick reviews.

I swear all of these flavors are real. I couldn’t make these up if I tried. Since I know some of them will be hard to believe, I’m providing links to each of the flavor’s “pages” on the Walkers Crisps website so you can see/vote for yourself.

This is what fish & chips are supposed to look like.

1. Fish and Chips. Well, this IS England after all. It makes perfect sense to sell a crisp that has the flavor of the most popular bit of pub fare. The problem is, the “chips” part of “fish and chips” is a fried potato. So basically that part of the flavor is handled by the crisp itself. So what you have here is a cod-flavored potato crisp. Dreadful.

2. Builder’s Breakfast. Again, this one panders well to the demographic as it has the flavors of a traditional English breakfast all on one crisp. Eggs, sausage, bacon and beans. A noble effort for sure, but the reality is that there are only so many artificial flavors you can cram onto a crisp at one time. The result tastes like powdered eggs with cheap beans, and the great meat flavors are nowhere to be found. Additionally, there is a reason English breakfasts are served hot. These flavors just don’t taste right at room temperature. Horrid.

Looks good huh? What’s missing? Oh right - no potato chips!

3. Chili and Chocolate.While I’m not a fan of the trend in the US to add an abundance of spice to everything, I think chocolate and spice have the ability to go together quite well. I thought maybe this one had a shot. One bite in, and I realized there were two elements to this flavor combination that are tantamount to enjoying their union. First, you have to use real chocolate and real hot peppers - not this artificial crap. Secondly, they can’t reside on a potato crisp. I have yet to find anyone over here who describes these crisps as anything but “awful,” so that will be my verdict as well. Awful.

4. Onion Bahji. England has a love of Indian food, so this is not as obscure as it would be were this to be offered in the US. (An onion bahji for the record is basically a spiced onion fritter usually made with chickpea flour, then pan-fried like a latke.) The take of this was to combine a mild sweet onion flavor with a mild curry flavor. The result is actually not bad at all on a crisp, which acts as the starchy base one would find in a bahji. Decent.

5. Crispy Duck and Hoisin. Anyone who knows me knows I absolutely LOVE duck. That being said, Peking duck, served with hoisin is one of my all-time favorite ways to enjoy the bird. So I really looked forward to trying this flavor. The problem was, at NO POINT in the tasting of these crisps did I come across a flavor that even remotely reminded me of “duck” or “hoisin”. They tasted like BBQ potato chips with a mild onion flavor. While all in all, this wasn’t terrible, it was not at all what I was expecting given the name on the bag. Disappointing.

And now for one that made my jaw drop when I first saw it. Arguably the total motivation behind this whole post:

No really, this bag is for real. It actually has a distressed looking squirrel on the fornt of it!

6. Cajun Squirrel. Seriously. How did this happen? Someone thought this flavor up, submitted it, the board of selectors at Walkers green lighted it, some dude in a lab worked on making an artificial flavor that tastes like… this flavor… they put it on a crisp, made bags for it, and distributed them. SOMEWHERE along this chain of events you’d think someone would have stood up, thrown off the chains of procedural inertia and exclaimed:

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING!?!”

But alas, nobody did this, and these crisps were born. Yes, I actually paid for a bag of them so you could see them. And yes, I actually tried them. The initial flavor of them was again similar to a BBQ potato crisp. It looks like they thankfully stuck with the “cajun” aspect of the crisp, and downplayed the whole “squirrel” part. I was actually almost disappointed that these weren’t as horrible as they could (should) have been. But when I stopped eating them, the aftertaste kicked in. Perhaps this is where the “squirrel” aspect - or how they envisioned it - kicked in. It was ghastly. Like I had eaten some kind of old meat. It was intense. So I ate an orange, to sort of wash the taste out. But no - now I was stuck with orange and… umm… “squirrel”… It was a mess.

Even if I could tolerate the aftertaste, and thought the “cajun” crisp was OK, I still would be uneasy about eating chips that were purporting to be “squirrel” flavored. If somebody handed me a delicious crisp with a wonderful salt and vinegar flavor, I would be happy with it. But if they then told me that this flavor was called “Rabid Howler Monkey in Vinegar,” I would assuredly spit it out. It’s all about the marketing, and on this flavor, all I can say is: What the hell were you all thinking? Give it a miss.

So now it’s time to vote. The most tolerable is the Onion Bahji, but still it doesn’t inspire me to go out and buy a bag of them. I will therefore abstain, which means the good people at Walkers miss out on this chance to get my mailing address, email and phone number. They’ll just have to enjoy the fact that no matter which one wins, I’ll still be buying the regular old salt and vinegar.

Update 5/18/09: The winner in this contest has been announced! If you’d like to see which flavor won, and what the winner got as a result, you can read all about it here!

Chef Matt

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