Kotas Reviews Electric Lime and Sea Salt Lays

Ah, it's Spring. The time of hay fever, 30 degree temperature swings over the course of 8 hours, and whatever new flavor monstrosities that Lay's has cooked up for us over the winter. We're reaching the long tail of this phase of flavor expansions though, as you'll see. I've seen this before, when a company has run through innumerable flavor combinations and just starts jamming together crap and slapping a weird name on it. I saw it with Kool-Aid, I saw it with Oreo, and I'm seeing it again with Lay's. But ya'll ain't here for a history lesson, so let's get to it. Today we review Lay's Electric Lime and Sea Salt chips.

Wavy, because shut up!

Here we go again down the rabbit hole of chip flavors that the Lord Himself never intended. I do appreciate a willingness to experiment, but at this point I think the R&D folk are just snorting flavor dust and randomly assigning things. Eh, let's get on with it. The bag is actually kinda cool, with a shiny foil edging, but the main picture, while well staged, is just sorta...meh? If it's so damn electric why aren't there lightning bolts or something around the lime and sea salt? No, it looks like an unfinished art installation. Still, it's not terrible and a meh package often conceals a taste sensation. Shall we open it? WE SHALL!

I bless the green flakes on my WAAAAAVY CHIIIIIIIPS! (with apologies to Toto)

They ain't much to look at, are they? They sort of resemble sour cream and onion chips, and have a similar looking flavor dust: white with green specks. What makes these electric again? I guess there is only one way to find out! Well, that wasn't what I expected, but I guess you could call it electric. The tang of citric acid is incredibly strong on these chips, almost overwhelming the lime flavor, but not quite. Additionally, the potato flavor is also incredibly strong, which doesn't mesh well with citric acid. You know what is really weird though? There is almost NO salt flavor! That's right, a chip whose two claims to fame are Lime and Sea Salt, only managed to get one of them even on the chip. Now, it's not a terrible flavor. I did not spit it out, and I will finish the bag eventually. It's just incredibly weird and disappointing. I think the lime part may have had a sweetness to it that somehow cancelled out the salt flavor, because these are potato chips so OF COURSE they have salt on them. It is just a really baffling flavor.

On the FACE Rating System, these chips get 1 Frowny Face. I can appreciate creativity and novelty as much as the next person, but this is just something that happened when a few of the people down in the Flavor Lab got high and started hallucinating. If you really love citric acid, and also think that it would go great with potato, I suppose these are the chips for you. For me however, I will move on to other, hopefully actually decent flavors.