Chocolate Potato Snacks

Calbee

Let me start off this review by saying that I believe chocolate covered potato chips could work. In fact, I've eaten chocolate covered potato chips, as well as potato chips in chocolate bars, and enjoyed them both. At first this may seem like a really strange idea, but done right chocolate and potato chips are a really good combination of sweet and salty. The trick is that it has to be done well. I'll tell you right off the bat, Calbee did not do it well at all.

We can start with the potato snacks themselves. I'll be honest, when I bought this bag of salty treats, I thought I was getting chocolate flavoured potato chips. If you look closely at the bag, you'll see that it's decorated with French fries as well as slices of potato. But you don’t actually get potato chips at all, crunchy French fries is what you get. The problem is you don't get real French fries either. What you get are something between a cheese puff and a Pringles chip in the shape of a French fry. I couldn't say for sure if there was even any real potato in these at all. They're almost totally flavourless, they pretty much just tasted like salty sticks of Styrofoam.

As you may have noticed I haven't mentioned anything about chocolate yet. That's because the chips (using the British term) themselves don't have any chocolate flavour at all. Instead what you're given is two small squeeze packets of what I would call "brown chocolate looking oil product". I would call it chocolate, but that would be an insult to many chocolate treats I've eaten over the years. This brown goo looks like chocolate, and even smells faintly of chocolate, but there's nothing else chocolate about it at all. It's missing any kind of cocoa flavour, anything at all. It just tastes like coconut oil.

Put these two combinations together and you have a salty stick dipped in coconut oil. Had the chocolate been even marginally better this treat might have worked. But since the cocoa isn't nearly present enough, and since you're given such a small amount of this chocolate goo, these salty sticks are just as bland with the chocolate as they are without the chocolate.
This is a good idea, and it could work, it just doesn't work in this particular case.