Why You Should Steer Clear Of Whole Foods When Buying Plain Potato Chips

As much as we all love Zapp's Voodoo Chips, Kettle's delicious ranch-flavored chips, or any number of delightfully savory flavored potato chips, there's something to be said for simplifying the experience. Just as a simple vegetable stew can be enough to get a snooty French food critic to flash back to his childhood and write you a glowing review if it's made right (yes, we have been rewatching "Ratatouille" lately, why do you ask?), plain potato chips can rock your world with nothing more than potatoes, salt, and a little bit of oil. But it has to be done right, you know? That's why, in our ultimate ranking of various brands of plain potato chips, we put Whole Foods 365 Kettle Cooked Sea Salt Potato Chips right at the bottom.

To be clear, we're not saying that these chips are awful or anything; as we noted ourselves, "it's hard for a potato chip to be bad." Just like pizza and movies starring Nicolas Cage, you can find something to enjoy about any potato chip so long as the execution is basically competent. But while the 365 chips offer a theoretically pure experience with just three ingredients (potatoes, salt, and sunflower oil), that only makes it easier for one off-balance element to derail the whole experience. Although we found that "the chips were well-salted," we were put off by the oil. More explicitly, "the dark, muddy taste of stale sunflower oil [that] takes the driver's seat."

Like we said, we weren't utterly disgusted by Whole Foods' 365 Kettle Cooked Sea Salt Potato Chips. (Geez, what a mouthful.) Still, when you're a grocery store chain that's not-so-affectionately nicknamed "Whole Paycheck" for its steep prices, you're going to at least want to offer some bang for the customers' bucks. Unfortunately, the 365 brand name's track record for that is mixed, to say the least.

There were some 365 products that impressed us. For instance, when we did our ketchup taste test,  tasters remarked that it had "the sweetness of fire-roasted tomatoes." We also dug their instant coffee, which came in at a respectable #4 in our instant coffee ranking as we praised its "mellow smoothness." But in other areas, we found a disappointing lack of flavor. We ranked 365 salsa dead last in our red salsa ranking, writing that "to call it bland would be an insult to Wonder Bread." Ditto for 365 barbecue sauce, which "just tastes like sugar with the slightest sour hint of vinegar". We suppose that, by having a strong and unpleasant sunflower oil flavor, 365 Kettle Cooked Sea Salt Potato Chips at least provide some kind of flavor, which could be considered an improvement. But for the price we're paying, we should expect a bit more, don't you think?