You’re standing in the chip aisle. The name-brand bag is $5.49. The store brand next to it is $2.19. Same kind of chip. Same basic ingredients. Your brain does the math, and you grab the cheap one. Smart move, right? Sometimes. But sometimes you get home, crack open that bag, and immediately regret every decision that led you to this moment. Some store-brand chips are genuinely great. Others taste like salted cardboard fried in motor oil. Recent blind taste tests have sorted the good from the truly awful, and the results are wild — because the worst offenders come from stores you probably shop at every single week.
Kroger Crispy and Crunchy Ripples — Dead Last and Deserving It
Out of 16 store-brand chips tested in a blind taste test, Kroger’s Crispy and Crunchy Ripples came in dead last. Not second to last. Not “eh, they’re fine.” Last. The testers said these chips failed in every single category they measured. The salt situation was dire — so much salt that whatever potato flavor might have existed was buried under a sodium avalanche. Then there was the grease. These chips left an oily film on fingers and an unpleasant aftertaste that lingered. One tester described the flavor as “oddly mechanical,” which is maybe the most disturbing two-word review a food product can receive. They also left a weird residue on the tongue. These are supposed to be a budget version of Ruffles, which cost more than triple the price. The consensus? Spend the extra few bucks on actual Ruffles. Life is too short for mechanical-tasting chips.
Clancy’s Cheesy Queso Chips (Aldi) — The Ones Reddit Begged People to Avoid
In April 2025, a Reddit user felt so strongly about Clancy’s Cheesy Queso potato chips from Aldi that they posted a public warning. The title of the thread: “These are so bad that I feel compelled to warn you.” The original poster said the chips had a stale aroma and tasted like someone tried to force a corn-chip flavor onto a potato chip. That was the nice review. One commenter wrote that after trying to figure out what the taste reminded them of, they landed on “the water you drain from tuna in the can.” Their cats, apparently, were fans. Another person said the chips tasted like they were seasoned with raw sewage, and that only about one in every ten chips had anything approaching a decent flavor. That’s a 10% success rate. You’d get better odds flipping a coin twice.
Clancy’s Original Baked Chips (Aldi) — Instant Mashed Potatoes in Chip Form
Aldi’s Clancy’s brand keeps showing up on these lists, and not in the way Aldi fans want. In a May 2025 ranking, Clancy’s original baked potato chips were named the worst baked potato chips you can buy. The testers said they tasted like underwhelming instant mashed potatoes — and since they were undersalted, even that sad fake-potato flavor was hard to detect. The texture was thick and starchy, which is the opposite of what you want from a baked chip. You buy baked chips expecting something light and crispy. These were neither. Testers said they didn’t want to go beyond the first bite. Reddit users have piled on too, posting about a general decline in Clancy’s quality and calling the chips bland and underseasoned across the board. The recommendation from testers was blunt: spend the extra dollar or two on Baked Lay’s or Baked Ruffles, both of which landed in the top five of the same ranking.
Clancy’s Sour Cream and Onion (Aldi) — No Cream, No Onion, No Point
A sour cream and onion chip has one job: taste like sour cream and onion. Clancy’s version from Aldi failed that job so completely that testers in an April 2025 evaluation named it Aldi’s most disappointing chip. Instead of the tangy dairy richness of sour cream and the aromatic punch of onion, testers got a vague, nondescript sourness that didn’t taste like either ingredient. The seasoning was caked on each chip in a dusty layer that, combined with the baked texture, created something mealy and chalky. Redditors have gone after this flavor too, calling it “starchy and flavorless” with seasoning that tastes chemical and vinegary. The ironic part? A separate review from Sporked experts actually praised Clancy’s sour cream and onion as the best flavor the brand makes. So either the quality varies wildly from batch to batch, or people’s standards are all over the map. Either way, the advice from most testers was the same: just buy Lay’s Sour Cream & Onion and stop gambling.
Walmart Great Value Original Chips — Thin, Bland, and Weirdly Raw
This one is confusing because Walmart’s Great Value brand actually has some winners (more on that in a second). But the Original variety? A mess. In the same 16-chip blind taste test, Great Value Original chips looked thin and delicate but tasted like undercooked potato — somehow thick and raw-tasting despite appearing paper thin. They were also bland and undersalted. The reviewer called them a “Great Value in quantity” but said the quality was completely absent. Customer reviews on Walmart’s own website tell a split story. Some people swear they’re just as good as Lay’s. Others have opened bags to find nothing but burned chips. Multiple reviewers complained about the bags themselves — they rip in weird spots every time, making it impossible to get a clean opening or seal them back up. So even if you get a decent bag, you’re fighting the packaging to eat them.
Target Good & Gather Kettle Chips — Crunchy but Confused
Target’s Good & Gather kettle chips showed up in two separate taste tests and got mediocre marks in both. In one test, the chips had inconsistent texture from chip to chip — some were crispy, some weren’t, and the crunch you expect from a kettle chip was hit or miss. The oil and salt balance was fine, but “fine” doesn’t win awards. In a separate blind taste test across Connecticut grocery stores, testers were harsher. One said the chips tasted like “eating fried oil and salt” — which, yeah, technically describes all potato chips, but it shouldn’t be the dominant experience. Another tester detected a dirty fryer oil flavor. The folded, craggy appearance looked promising, but flavor missed the mark. For a store that’s otherwise pretty good at private-label food, this was a letdown.
Whole Foods 365 Chips — Paying More for Less Flavor
At $2.99 for 10 ounces, Whole Foods’ 365 brand chips aren’t even that cheap compared to other store brands. And yet, testers in a May 2025 blind test found them to be paper thin with tons of breakage in the bag — some chips intact, many in pieces. Worse, they were one of the least salty options tested. The blandness was bad enough that testers said it literally prevented them from reaching for another chip. When a chip can’t make you want a second one, it has failed at the only thing chips need to do. You’re shopping at Whole Foods, presumably accepting a higher price point, and getting a blander product than what Walmart sells for less. That math doesn’t work.
The Clancy’s Problem Is Bigger Than One Flavor
Aldi has a cult following for good reason — the store is cheap, fast, and a lot of its house brands are genuinely great. The Irish butter is a solid Kerrygold alternative. The hot sauce holds its own against Frank’s Red Hot. But Clancy’s chips have a consistency problem that keeps surfacing. Consumer reviews mention bags that are nothing but crumbs before you even open them. People have found the wrong flavor inside a labeled bag. Kiplinger back in 2019 recommended paying $2.98 for Doritos over 89 cents for Clancy’s tortilla chips, and the quality gap apparently hasn’t closed since. The weird part is that professional taste testers sometimes rank Clancy’s well — Taste of Home once named them “best overall potato chip” in a blind test. That disconnect between professional reviews and what actual customers experience in the real world points to a quality control issue. You might get a great bag. You might get dusty crumbs that taste like chemicals. It’s a coin flip, and the coin is greasy.
The Store Brand That Actually Won
After all this doom, there’s good news: not every store brand is a disaster. Walmart’s Great Value Ripple Potato Chips were crowned the best store-bought chip in a June 2025 blind taste test of 16 brands. Made with just three ingredients — potatoes, vegetable oil, and salt — they were crispy without being painful to eat, flavorful without being greasy, and cheap without tasting like it. Testers said a single bite was enough to confirm they’d found the winner. Great Value’s salt and vinegar variety also earned the top spot in its category from Sporked experts, who called the chips huge, delicate, crisp, and malty. So the same Walmart brand that makes a lousy original chip somehow makes excellent ripple and salt and vinegar chips. Go figure. The takeaway? Not all store brands are equal, and not all varieties within the same store brand are equal either. The difference between the best and worst chip in the same brand can be enormous — and the only way to know is to eat them.
