The Best Potato Chips: A Blind Taste Test

By Sam Stone

In our Taste Test series, BA editors conduct blind comparisons to discover the best supermarket staples (like vanilla ice cream or frozen pizza). Today, which potato chip will satisfy your crunchiest cravings?

What's not to love about potato chips? They’re cheap, easy to find, and gloriously junk-foody. A potato chip's delicate, salty crunch is the quintessential snack on its own. But added to a sandwich, for instance, or even boosted by complementary seasonings and dips, it alchemizes, transforming into something greater than the sum of its parts.

There are seemingly endless brands and genres of potato chips to choose from. Would you prefer baked or fried? With ruffles or without? Does a kettle cooked chip sound appealing? Which oil would you prefer your chip to be fried in? The veritable mountain of options is overwhelming. To narrow down our taste test, we focused solely on potato chips that were classically fried; that means excluding baked, kettle cooked, and flavored chips—we love them, but we’re focusing on the original formula here.

We tasted seven of the most popular potato chip brands to evaluate their texture, crunch, balance of salt and oil, and earthy potato flavor.

The specs: Wise chips were made with the usual combination of frying oils (corn, cottonseed, sunflower, soybean, or canola), and its nutrition facts don't reveal any notable anomalies. Based on its production, it's hard to nail down why this one might have been disappointing—perhaps it was made without love?

The verdict: If you’re looking for a life-affirming potato chip with a crispy, crackling crunch and a vibrant ping of saltiness in each bite…keep looking. Wise chips were a disappointment to our tasters. Editorial operations associate Kate Kassin likened the lingering, chemical-tinted taste to "toxic waste," and senior cooking editor Emma Laperruque made note of an old, stale oil smell and taste. Finding a pairing for the Wise potato chips was tough.

The specs: Boulder Canyon chips are fried in avocado oil, and had a notably low sodium level compared to others we tasted.

The verdict: Every taste test has to have a loser, and Boulder Canyon was this taste test's clear loser. The chip was curiously bubbly, or, as Kassin put it, "wispy and thin." After her first bite, associate cooking editor Antara Sinha said, "This smells like airplane air," the corners of her mouth turning down slightly. As the team agreed that a chip like this would be best put to use in a sandwich, where much of its flavor and texture could be masked, commerce producer Alaina Chou gently placed the remainder of her chip in the trash.

The specs: In addition to potatoes and salt, Utz's chips are fried in a combination of cottonseed oil, corn oil, and/or sunflower oil.

The verdict: Utz potato chips were a strong contender in our taste test: We liked its crisp, bubbly texture. But there were a few minor flaws. These chips were a touch too crumbly, rather than exactly crispy, and slightly undersalted. Associate SEO editor Zoe Denenberg noted the pale color, while Sinha noticed a tinge of stale oil on some chips. For a chip like this with a more fragile bite and flavor, we thought something bougie and light like caviar might be the perfect pairing (though we weren't able to pass this off as a research expense and test it for ourselves).

The specs: Whole Foods’ potato chips are fried in expeller-pressed oil of sunflower, safflower, and/or canola.

The verdict: Whole Foods’ in-store line can be all over the map in terms of quality, so we were eager to see how their potato chips would perform. All in all, this was a heartier chip with the bite and hefty texture of a baked one. Unfortunately, it lacked the sharp, salty kick we were looking for. Denenberg enjoyed its slightly nuttier taste, and the general consensus was that this chip would be best enjoyed with a thick, rich dip—a spinach and artichoke, for instance.

The specs: Herr's chips were tied for the highest sodium level in our taste test, which, for our tasters, meant they were too salty.

The verdict: Herr's chips were certainly not the worst chip we encountered in this taste test, but their thicker, sturdiness wasn't exactly to our liking. Kassin found them too salty—a big problem within the potato chip format, which leans heavily on the correct ratio of saltiness in each bite. Upon first chew, we found the Herr's chips to be particularly clumpy in the mouth, in a stick-to-your-teeth kind of way. A thicker chip like this deserves a thicker dip, though we’d recommend something less salty since the chip will bring along its own hefty dose of salinity. How about a Warm Seven-Layer Skillet Dip?

The specs: No blend of oils here, Trader Joe's chips featured an ingredient list that was short, sweet and to the point: sunflower oil, potatoes, and salt.

The verdict: On its royal blue bag, Trader Joe's calls its potato chips "Trader Joe's Ode to the Classic Potato Chip." The unnecessarily long name was foreboding, reminiscent of some innovative chef's "take on cheese pizza" that ends up tasting nothing like cheese pizza. Our tasters were pleasantly surprised, then, at the particularly large, round chips with a nice balance of salt. While some enjoyed the earthy, creamy potato flavor of these chips, others wanted a more neutral taste. We agreed that these chips were tasted the most potatoey, and that they’d be best served alongside something creamy and zingy like this spicy cheddar cheese spread.

The specs: The chips are fried in canola, sunflower, and/or soybean oil, as many other competitors also were.

The verdict: Lay's is a classic potato chip for a reason: It has a "shatteringly crisp" crunch, as Sinha noted, and each chip had just the right level of saltiness. Lay's chips were particularly thin—Laperruque noticed that you could see through the chips if held up to light—which no doubt contributed to the satisfying chomping sound that was so pronounced, we could hear it through closed mouths. Denenberg enjoyed the slight peppery note, and Laperruque was a fan of its "big potato flavor." Lay's were the balanced favorite that we’d take to the couch to catch up on our latest HBO binge and "accidentally" finish the bag.