Lay's Cooling Sensation "Melon Bingsu Flavor"

Frito-Lay

These might be the weirdest potato chips I’ve ever tasted. When you’re talking about food, often the concept of contrasting flavours comes up. In candy, sweet and savoury is a common set of contrasting flavours that often works. I’m sure there’s some kind of science behind why contrasting flavours are tasty, but I don’t really understand it. The thing about contrasting flavours is there’s a trick to making them work. You have to have balance, each of the flavours has to balance together to create a working set of contrasting tastes. These potato chips do have contrasting flavour, but there are several problems.

These chips do have contrasting flavour, three or four of them (I haven’t really decided how many there are). Obviously being potato chips, they have a salty flavour, this is probably the least offensive of the flavours, and also one of the weakest in strength. Then there’s a sweet flavour, with just these two flavours these chips might have worked fine. The third flavour kind of worked with the sweet, it’s a melon flavour. This is the strongest flavour, and the one I personally disliked the most. On a good day real melon is tolerable, fake melon like this is just gross. It also makes your mouth confused because you expect a refreshing texture with a melon flavour, and potato chips just don’t have it.

The final flavour creeps up on you, and it’s the weirdest of them all, menthol. I understand that these chips are trying to recreate a frozen treat, but the cool feeling of menthol is very different than the cooling sensation of eating ice cream. Most notable is the fact that ice cream cools you off at the beginning, and doesn’t linger. Menthol is just a really strange sensation to have while eating chips.

I really tried to enjoy these chips. I wanted to like them because they were going somewhere completely different. They managed to go somewhere different, but there was no cohesion. I’m not sure this flavour could ever work, but to give it a fair shake you’d really have to balance the flavours out a little better. Most notably take down the melon flavour, boost up the salty flavour, and figure out a way to make the cooling flavour come in sooner and not linger. These chips were not good at all, I’m not sure I’ll be able to finish the entire bag. These chips are obviously an attempt to make a gimmick without really trying to make it work, or thinking about weather or not it could.