Lidl has new hand-cooked crisps in its range: are they worth the higher price?
New in Lidl stores: hand-cooked crisps in various flavours. But what exactly does hand-cooked mean, and are they worth the higher price?
Various flavours
The new hand-cooked crisps come in lightly sea salted, sea salt & balsamic vinegar and sea salt & black pepper varieties. And they look considerably more stylish than the regular bags of crisps. You also pay proportionally much more for a bag of these new hand-cooked crisps. A 150-gram bag costs €1.39. By comparison: at Lidl, a bag of plain crisps from the same brand, Snack Day, costs €1.09. However, you get a 250-gram bag for that price. Less flashy appearance and not hand-cooked.
But what exactly does hand-cooked mean, and are they worth the price?
Hand-cooked crisps: what does that actually mean?
If ‘hand-cooked’ is written on the packaging, you pay considerably more. It also sounds so wonderfully romantic: as if the potato farmer personally peeled and sliced the potatoes, lovingly cooked them, and then baked and fried them. Nice and artisanal—we like that. But unfortunately, these crisps also simply come from a factory, and crisp manufacturers could never fry all those bags of crisps by hand on such a large scale, of course.
Our favourite consumer affairs programme Keuringsdienst van waarde previously investigated the phenomenon of hand-cooked crisps. Well, then you already know in advance that we are being misled. The investigators concluded that the only manual work involved in making these stylish-looking crisps is setting up the machines.
Tasty, though
So, in fact, these crisps are no different from the regular bags of crisps without clever marketing terms such as ‘artisanal’ or ‘hand-cooked’ on them. Admittedly, they are tasty. The lightly salted hand-cooked crisps (still quite salty, by the way) received a solid pass mark from the editorial team. But the same applies to Lidl’s regular plain crisps. These even won the top prize in our supermarket plain crisps test once.
The cheapest tasty crisps
Conclusion: if you want to look chic, because you are taking crisps to a drinks gathering, for example, then hand-cooked crisps in luxury packaging are a fine idea. If you simply want to eat tasty crisps on a budget, just buy a regular bag of crisps. Want to save even more? HEMA sells incredibly cheap crisps that score extremely highly in a major crisp test.
