Oh Lay's, you give and you take away with your new chip flavors, but mostly I consider it a give. As much as I LOVE potato chips, I often find myself wanting new flavors to supplement my standard favorites of barbecue and cheddar sour cream. The new limited edition Lay's Chips that came out recently, in the middle of summer 2021, are a take on the flavors of other snacks.
That's right, you can now have the potato chip experience with the taste of Funyuns, Cheetos, and Cool Ranch Doritos. It seems like a total mind game to make familiar flavors have a different texture, but here we are, it's 2021 and we're all bored with everything.
I've read online that they are mostly widely available at Dollar General, where I found these. They were right there on an end cap at the Dollar General, and even the manager of the store I stopped by said he just saw where these were only put out yesterday. So they are still making their way onto shelves around the country as we speak. I went and got them the first day they were advertised as being available for purchase, because I had nothing better to do on a random weekday!
We gave them a try, and you can watch us tasting them on Youtube.
Lay's New Chip Flavor Comparison
Cheetos Lays Potato Chips
These tasted the most like the original snack to me. They are very Cheetos cheesy. This bag may be my favorite of the bunch. Your fingers will become orange stained just like with original Cheetos. These also tasted a lot like the Hispanic queso flavor chips that Lay's also sells.
Funyuns Potato Chips
Having never had a real Funyun, I thought these tasted a lot like sour cream and onion chips, but with a more pronounced onion taste. Lay's probably just adjusted the amounts from their sour cream and onion chips to ramp up the onion and tone down the sour cream ever so slightly on these Funyun flavored potato chips.
Cool Ranch Doritos Potato Chips
These tasted like regular Lay's ranch chips. Which I love them, so no harm done here. But as you may already know, Lay's already sells a ranch flavored chip, except this version isn't wavy.
Should I buy the Lay's new potato chip flavors?
Here's the secret behind these chips you may have figured out already... they are all regular Lays chip flavors already! Once we were in the middle of the video, it dawned on me that's exactly what this was. I still will say that the Cheetos one is quite realistically Cheeto-y and seemed like it probably had the most flavor tuning effort put into it.
So if you want to try something totally new, these chips are not it. As a marketer myself, I love the ploy behind it. This chip flavor launch definitely piqued people's interests without the company having to pay food scientists to create new flavors. If you were already going to be buying chips, it's worth it to give these a try. If you're looking for wild new flavors like the usual Lay's Do Me a Flavor summer releases, you will likely be disappointed in these.
Where can you find new Lay's potato chip flavors?
I found them at Dollar General on a special end cap, though Lays says they are available at "major retailers throughout the country". I have seen them at Target, Food Lion, and Walmart. The suggested retail price is $3.79 for larger bags, and $1.99 for snack-sized bags. So would you try these?!