It's kind of funny how this works - the very idea of a "spinach and artichoke" flavored potato chip is just so repellent to me that I would never have even briefly considered buying this product had I run into it in a regular supermarket. And yet, the same flavor, found as a remaindered item that the store is trying to dump, piques my interest enough that I drop a bag in my cart. I guess it's just morbid curiosity. After all, just how bad does a flavor have to be to get the price slashed to less than a third of the original ticket? How desperate does a store have to be to mark a product down so low in hopes of recovering some bit - some tiny fraction - of the money they paid to put this on the shelf?
In this case, pretty bad.
The chips don't smell very much like spinach or artichoke. They smell like garlic powder and dried sour cream, and some kind of powdered cheese, which is what a lot of flavored potato chips smell like these days. You wouldn't be able to tell from looking at the chips that they have any kind of vegetable flavorings at all, since there's no evidence of spinach or artichokes other than the very sparse occasional bit of dark green fleck on them which could be parsley or nori or green magic marker for all I could see.
And they don't taste much like spinach or artichoke, either. Remember that garlicy sour creamy cheesy smell I described? That's pretty much what they tasted like, too. Garlic, onion, a hint of sour cream, a bit of Parmesan cheese, but damn little artichoke or spinach. Maybe they were going for the taste of dip? I dunno, but they weren't very good and after the opened bag sat around for three or four days without being touched after the initial tasting, I took the family's hint and pitched 'em in the bin. And nothing of value was lost.
I picked up a bunch of Boulder chips form OSJL over the winter. I thought their salt and vingar ones were pretty excellent.
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