In theory, salty licorice potato chips should not work at all. This should just be a gimmick where you buy a bag of these chips as a joke for you and your friends to eat and talk about what a silly idea it is to mix potato chips with licorice. It could also be a gimmick to talk about the Finnish obsession with licorice, since these chips are made in Finland, and they are truly obsessed with licorice. This is all well and good, but the people at Chipventures did one thing to ruin this perfect silly gimmick, they made the chips very well.

Most companies that make this kind of snack will use cheap ingredients and strong fake flavours in order to make a gimmick that people buy once, but won’t buy again. These limited time snacks sell well at first, but after a while no one wants to get them again because they don’t work, and the companies that make them know that in the long term they’re not that great. These chips on the other hand are very thoughtful and of a pretty high quality. So, as chips they’re actually kind of tasty and they have a really great crunch. Stranger still is that they seemed to have tried to figure out how much licorice would work with a potato chip. So instead of dousing these chips in a strong fake licorice flavour, they’ve added a nice high quality subtle licorice flavour that kind of compliments the salty potato chips.

I guess what I’m saying is, the people at Chipventures (great name by the way), have done everything they can to make me want to eat another bag of licorice potato chips, instead of selling shock value. They’ve kind of achieved this as well. I’m not sure I’d seek another bag of these out, but if offered I’d happily eat a few.

Licorice and salt are a combination that works, but adding licorice to potato chips shouldn’t work at all. The thing is, Chipventures made the best chip they could, and it kind of works.