FRANK – Grilled Cheese & Ketchup Kettle Chips

In the past few years, many companies have made a push to crank out their own house brands. I get why – the margins are better with owned brands, and you can slowly build up customer loyalty if you can successfully build the brand in an organic way. I think the best example of this is President’s Choice. They started decades ago as Loblaws’ own brand and these days you can find practically anything and everything under their own banner. They’ve done it for so long and so successfully that some of my fellow Canadians can attest to their branded stuff being better than some of the other alternatives (some of their cookies are on point).

FRANK is Canadian Tire’s attempt at something similar. FRANK is a relatively new thing for the company, and something that’s drawn me to them is their simple, yet cute and effective marketing. That and all the dad jokes they like to use. I’ve had some past experiences with their chips, and I have a few family members who swear by their plain ripple flavour. Given my past positive experiences, I decided on a whim to order a box full of candies and chips from them. You’ll be seeing a few of these reviews so…brace yourself.

Today we have a very…interesting? flavour. This is one of the few flavours they do that is in collaboration with Covered Bridge. Covered Bridge is a Canadian brand that specializes in kettle styled chips, so this collaboration makes sense, given that it’s supposedly a kettle chip. I’ve always kind of known that people eat their grilled cheeses with ketchup, but because I’ve never done it, or seen anyone do it, I just assumed it was one of those mythical fairy tales. Like unicorns and the construct of happiness. Something that people like to believe in or chase, to give them hope. Alas, hope is a dangerous thing. And so too, are these chips, probably.

The one thing I notice about this bag is that instead of being a lot more expensive than the typical variety, they instead give you less. This bag is only 142g, and is about 50 cents more. I guess it makes sense since kettle chips are usually considered “premium”. There’s only one way to see if it’s worth the premium though. I still can’t really wrap my mind around what grilled cheese and ketchup tastes like, and how you would capture that in a chip.

The bag doesn’t really smell like grilled cheese, but does smell a little like ketchup? Actually, it smells like a fresh batch of thick cut fries, with the distinct ketchup smell. Like a freshly fried batch of fries that just got drench in ketchup. I must say, the smell is very appetizing, but at no point would I think grilled cheese. The chips looks a little different from what you would expect from either a kettle chip or a ripple/wavy chip. It’s not quite as ripped as a ruffle, but also not quite as “kettle” like as well…Kettle brand chips. I get the impression this is due to how kettle chips are made, and at some point the original chip was larger, only to be condensed into a smaller shape upon being fried up.

I get the impression that it is indeed what happens, as the texture is quite dense and crunchy. It has that nice distinct crunch of kettle chips, but benefits from those ripples in that you can break them apart at the ridges for a “controlled” break as I like to call it. Texture wise, these are quite scrumptious, and are a win. On to the flavour…this one is a bit hard to pin down. The first piece I had was pretty much just ketchup. It wasn’t until my third piece that I got some of that cheese flavour. It’s kind of inconsistent I find…where some are more prominent in the cheese flavour than others. The ketchup however, is ever present. The chips that have some cheese on them actually play well with the ketchup to cut some of that vinegar aftertaste (which I am not a fan of).

Ultimately, the flavour is a bit gimmicky and I’m not sure I would buy this for the flavour alone. For the texture though, I would. If they tried this with another flavour it would most likely be an instant buy for me. As is, I probably wouldn’t but it unless it was on sale. I do enjoy it though, and if I’m itching for that odd combo of cheese and ketchup, I would consider this the top choice.