Calbee – Winter Snow Cheese Chips

I feel that as society moves faster and things advance at a quicker clip, as do our attention spans. We often search for the new hotness, or the next best thing and move on from the old one faster. To date myself, when I was a kid I would play the same Gameboy game for upwards of six months. I didn’t have the luxury of all these other options and releases, so I had to make due with what I had. And I made it last. These days though, I feel as though I have the luxury to not stick to something if it doesn’t suit me or gel with me. Now I can simply pick something else up and move on.

It’s because of this that I feel like companies and their marketing departments have to get creative and squeeze every bit out of the lemon that is product innovation and finding ways to make things seem fancier or sexier than they actually are. I’d be lying if I said I fully understood the marketing logic behind this. I guess winter ties into to snow, and snow could arguably be connected to cheese. You know, powdered snow, powdered cheese. It’s a stretch by anyone’s imagination, but I guess they were reaching for anything to help them sell the concept of seasonal potato chips.

Apparently the this is a three cheese powder blend of Camembert, Gouda and cheddar. Also, I could be wrong, but they are showing Hokkaido in the upper left on the front of the bag so I can only assume they’re also trying to sell me on the fact that some of the ingredients are sourced from the region, whether it’s the potatoes or the cheese, I honestly can’t tell.

Visually these look like a lot of effort went into cutting the ridges. Unlike typical ruffled or wavy chips, these seem to be very intentionally rectangular grooves, which seems difficult and would require specialized equipment. I’m not sure what the reason for it is, but it doesn’t change the mouthfeel or texture all that much. it still tastes very much like a normal potato chip, but oddly enough more like a normal flat potato chip than a wavy or rippled one.

The flavour is quite mild on these. If you were to tell me there’s used powdered cheese, I would believe you as I do taste it, I would just question how much powder was used. Visually you can’t really see any difference, but you can smell the cheese. Similar to the cheese powder you get on Korean fried chicken, the seasoning has a cheesy taste, but it’s also got a very sweet quality to it. The sweet and savoury quality of the cheese while mild, does compliment the flavour of the potato chip itself.

While I was expecting a stronger cheese flavour, it was still a very nice, pleasant and light snack that didn’t leave me feeling disgusting or bloated, so I do find value in that. That being said, I wouldn’t go out of my way to get this if you feel like trying it, as there’s nothing too special about this, apart from the slick marketing of it all.