As a general rule, I respect what The Wirecutter does. Aside from being owned by The New York Times, a genocidal and transphobic rag whose editorial board frequently undermines good reporting, they serve a clear purpose. I would probably not be where I am today without The Wirecutter’s work and I have friends and colleagues who work there. But recommending the Amazon Fresh Classic Potato Chips as the best plain potato chip fundamentally misunderstands the spiritual and practical place of the potato chip.
The top-line reason why Amazon does not make the “Best Plain Potato Chip” is because they are sold exclusively by Amazon. I am not so precious as to suggest that you can’t enjoy chips from a big consumer brand like Costco, Aldi, or the Frito-Lay corporation. I am not even suggesting that the chip tastes bad – its qualities as a chip are irrelevant.
The best chip is not something you buy with next day or same day shipping. The best time to buy plain potato chips is whenever you want or need potato chips. You panic buy them in bulk because you have a BBQ or a party you forgot about. You impulse buy a bag at the liquor store, supermarket, or deli because you want a tasty snack. If you can’t buy a bag of chips immediately at retail, then your chip lacks a core, load-bearing feature that all plain chips must have. Though many of my choices and interests are defined by optimization, I find it offensive to view potato chips the way one would a USB charger, router, or laundry detergent.
While I respect the sheer rigor with which The Wirecutter tested these chips, the topic of plain chips goes beyond the remit of what The Wirecutter does. The purpose of The Wirecutter is ultimately to suggest the inoffensive “mostly good enough” pick for a subset of upper middle class Times readers financed in part by Amazon affiliate links. As a result, there is a perspective at work through the entire review that feels slightly alien to me. I would be fine with Consumer Reports or America’s Test Kitchen doing this kind of testing, but mainly because I think they have better taste and sense than to recommend “the Amazon chip.”
But I should say that I half-agree with some of their other picks. Some of them are correct in that they are from Pennsylvania, the unimpeachable snack belt of America. Others are acceptable because they are made by Lay’s and chips are Lay’s’ entire deal. On the whole I feel like The Wirecutter included too many categories, and I find some of their reasons for invalidating the competition to be a little precious and a tiny bit dull. Here is my response to each.
- Best kettle: Deep River Sea Salt Kettle – I am gonna be honest, Deep River are fine but kinda mid. Just sort of an inoffensive chip in a category that should be a little gnarly by design. Also, Zapp’s is better and more interesting than Deep River, that’s just a fact.
- Best wavy chip: Lay’s Wavy Original – Sure, why not. I’m not gonna start a fight about wavy chips.
- Best extra-toasty classic potato chip: Great Value (Walmart) Crunchy Potato Chip – Incorrect, garbage chip.
- Best thin and crispy classic chip: Clancy’s (Aldi) – Sure. Aldi’s quality is generally good, although The Wirecutter did not test Lidl’s offerings, and as a rule I find Lidl to be better and more consistent than American Aldi Süd if we are ranking invasive German discount supermarket chains (the other one being Trader Joe’s, a subsidiary of Aldi Nord).
- Best less salty classic chip: Utz – Unimpeachable, probably the best choice on this list.
- Best lighter kettle chip: Lay’s Kettle Cooked Original – Fine, although going to Lay’s for a kettle chip feels wrong to me for difficult to articulate reasons. I trust Lay’s with inoffensive big store potato chips, freakish chips that Mike Fahey used to review like that one Reuben flavor, and boutique Chinese potato chip flavors that I can only find at Asian grocery stores and illegal weed stores for a 1,000% markup next to lychee-flavored Oreos.
- Best wavy chips with good looks and baked-potato flavor: Great Value Ripple Original and Wavy Original – I have been consistently disappointed by Walmart’s offerings here, but again I also don’t really go for wavy or ripple chips unless someone brings them to a BBQ. At least you can go to the store to buy these.
- Best kettle chip with french fry flavors (?): Herr’s Original Kettle Cooked – That’s a weird category, but Herr’s are good so sure.
- Best lard-fried potato chips worth considering: Dieffenbach’s Old Fashioned Original Kettle Chips and Grandma Utz Kettle-Style Potato Chips – Along with classic Utz and Herr’s these are both good chips. The Grandma Utz are better than the Deep River, and Dieffenbach’s’ radiate that old timey Pennsylvania quality that I associate with a good snack the same way the Boyer candy company, creators of the Malo and Smoothie cup, do.
I could quibble about individual choices all day, but more than anything else, I do not want to cede the plain potato chip to Jeff Bezos. Amazon has attempted and often succeeded in making themselves the default choice for entire product categories. They have burned billions of dollars shoving awful little narc orbs in our homes that suck to use even within their category. They have shaped entire communities for the worse around their distribution facilities. They have made a lot of TV, some of which is pretty solid but most of it looks like incoherent, cheaply-made garbage. But everyone has their own capricious lines in the sand, and mine is an Amazon exclusive potato chip.
