Lay’s Southern Biscuits & Gravy Flavored Potato Chips

I remember a time back in the 90’s when it seems like the giant food conglomerates decided to all experiment with crazy ideas… Crystal Pepsi, Heinz EZ Squeeze Funky Purple and Blastin’ Green ketchups (thought technically it was introduced in 2000… but we’ll call it the 90’s for the sake of this article), various foods that were made into cereal and various cereals that were made into every day foods, and just about everything came in pizza flavor.  And then there were potato chips.  It seems that all the chip companies were in a race to see what they could crush up into a powder and flavor chips with… Pizza, ketchup, sonic sour cream (not sour cream and onion… just sour cream), and Xtreme (is xtreme really a flavor? Hard to tell… but it was everywhere in the 90’s).

As they say though, history tends to repeat its self… and I guess we’re at the point where the 90’s food experimentation is attempting to make it’s way back into our grocery stores (great for me! Not so sure if it’s great for anyone else…)

Today’s review is of Lay’s Southern Biscuits & Gravy flavored potato chips.  Now one might be saying, “it’s gotta be like a poutine right? Potato french fries and gravy.”  Who doesn’t love gravy?

But as we’ve learned in the past, not all gravy is made equal.

The Southern Biscuits & Gravy was the winner of the Lay’s 2015 Do Us A Flavor competition. Lay’s asked people from around the country to submit locally inspired flavor ideas that was weeded out by a panel of experts and Nick Lachey, then eventually submitted to a fan vote.  The winner this year was travel agent Hailey Green who plans to take her own travels with the money she has won in the contest.

Opening the bag of chips, its evident that the gravy train hit this bag hard.  While I love gravy, this was a bit much.  It was as if the bag was 50% potato chips, 50% powdered gravy mix.

Looks wise, they looked like ordinary potato chips with specks of flavoring throughout.  I had sincerely hoped the flavor would live up to the hype, because again, who doesn’t love gravy?

Unfortunately I was let down.  While the mouthfeel was consistent with that of other Lay’s potato chips, the flavor was just all wrong. Yes, it tasted like pork gravy, but it was savory in all the wrong ways.  It was as if you threw up biscuits and gravy, and didn’t rinse your mouth out.  About 30 minutes later, you’d be tasting what these tasted like.

I don’t know if it was the gravy flavoring, or the fact that the gravy flavoring was on potato chips that made it taste so off.

I’d sincerely hope that Lay’s chooses for 2016 to do us a favor and not do us a flavor 🙂

Summary

There could have been potential here. Could have been… But again, maybe it’s time we considered putting actual gravy with our potato chips. Now that’s a winner!

What really turns me off of these chips is really that the potato chip flavor and the gravy flavor are not balanced right. It’s possible that they could get this combination to work, but I don’t see them making the investment at this point to make that happen.