“Here’s a funny flavor. Buy our potato bits.”

~The Marketing Team at Lay’s Potato Chips

Lay’s potato chips has a history of coming up with strange flavors, almost as if they know that coming up with strange flavors of your product an easy way to get accidentally free advertising from our site. (Our promotional staff is very bad about getting us paid from the companies whose products we inadvertently give free advertising to.)

Well, we might be a bit late to the party, but this summer they decided to do it again, coming up with eight regional specific potato chip flavors, because why have people vote for three different novelty flavored potato chips when you know our fat asses will have no qualms about going out and buying eight bags of chips that probably taste, at best, fine.

Anyway, we decided to list out these chips for you and rank them, based on how good we imagine they taste. Yes, that’s right, we’re not even going to go out and buy them, even though we are completely able to do so, but fuck it, Lay’s didn’t respond to our email request to “please send the potato chips, and some whiskey, do you guys make whiskey too?” so fuck it. This is going to be a very phoned in effort!

AFFotD Ranks Lay’s Regional Potato Chip Flavors

A template for whatever flavor you want, apparently

8: Cajun Spice

This frankly is kind of boring and disappointing from the Lay’s people. We were looking for, like, Jucy Lucy flavored potato chips, not something flavored after just…seasoning. This chip is about as exciting as a salt-and-vinegar flavored chip. It tastes fine, and it’s simple enough, but we’re not here for simple, we’re here for weird. Get your shit together, Lay’s.

7: New England Lobster Roll

There *clap* we *clap* fucking *clap* go *clap*. This is the unbridled insanity we were hoping for with this series. Like, we can’t imagine a world where a lobster roll flavored potato chip is actually, you know, good. In fact it sounds like a borderline nightmare. This is less a “flavor of potato chip that we would enjoy” and more “the fevered ranting of some meth head out in Skowhegan scribbled onto a Friendly’s menu.” But we love that they really went for this one.

6: Chesapeake Bay Crab Spice

It’s like the folks at Lay’s saw this list and asked themselves, “If only we can combine these guy’s complaints about going with a basic spice as a flavor with the complaint about a seafood-centered potato chip” and bam, we got ourselves this shit. The only saving grace is that old bay seasoning actually is pretty good on potato chips.

5: Thai Sweet Chilli

If we were good enough writers to manage to find something of interest to say about a Thai Sweet Chilli-flavored potato chip that conveyed anything but our pure apathy towards its existence, we’d be making enough money on this site that we could afford to actually buy the chips and try them for you. Instead, allow us to give the shruggiest of shrugs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

4: Fried Pickle and Ranch

The fried part is pretty redundant here, but okay we’ll roll with it. You’re usually going in the right direction when you start flavoring your potato chips after bar food that’s super unhealthy and has never been consumed by a sober person in the entire state of Arkansas. Lays makes a dill pickle chip, and they make ranch flavored Lay’s, so you can pretty much see the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup “you got your…” moment that led to this flavor’s inclusion. But we can get behind it.

3: Pimento Cheese

We’ll get into this a little bit more in the next item, but using cheese as an ingredient seems almost like cheating, because it’s hard to fuck up a cheese-flavored potato chip. That said, this pimento cheese isn’t quite weird enough for us to get super excited for it, but it makes up for that by tasting like something that very easily translates into “would taste good as a potato chip” territory.

2: Chile Con Queso

A few things here. First of all, like we said, cheese is never going to be a bad idea. Like, anything cheese related put into chip form, we’re going to be behind that 100%. Secondly, every American with a pulse and working taste buds can agree that chili cheese Fritos are by far the best Frito flavor, and is only slightly less addictive than fentanyl-spiked whiskey. So in our minds, chili con queso should taste pretty similar, even though the chiles involved here are in reference to peppers, not actual chili. Doesn’t matter, we’re all in.

But only one of these hits all the buttons of A—sounding like it would taste good as a chip while B—being a flavor that makes you go, “lol, what?” And that is…

1: Deep Dish Pizza

Given our past discussions of Chicago-style pizza around these parts, this decision shouldn’t be too surprising. But besides representing a regional food that also sounds insane to make as a potato chip, this actually is most probably delicious. Keep in mind, pizza flavored potato chips are surprisingly great. Just ask Pringles. And deep dish pizza is basically pizza with a  SHITLOAD MORE CHEESE, which, like, again, let us point your attention to items number two and three. By the way, everyone who makes a “Chicago-style pizza isn’t a pizza it’s a casserole” joke in the comments can preemptively go to hell. That joke’s tired as shit. Just like our staff will be after we go out and buy like, six bags of these chips and drown them down with a fifth of Woodford Reserve (another company we have failed to get money from).

So there you have it. If you’ve actually eaten all these chips and disagree with our blind non-taste test, go to the comments section and prepare for us to pay no attention to your opinions on the matter. We are infallible, even for shit we’ve never eaten. Deal with it.