It's the World Cup of crisps!
Just like the real World Cup, but with more crisps and less football. OK, no football. OK, it's just crisps
Charlie Brooker
Monday 5 April 2010

Last year's "Do us a Flavour" campaign, in which the company launched six temporary new varieties, was eventually won by the hideous "Builder's Breakfast", which tasted like a fried egg in an envelope. This year, they're celebrating the World Cup by launching 15 – yes, 15 – new flavours, each ostensibly representing a different nation. I was alerted to this exciting development by an email from Walker's PR agency – I'm presumably on their radar after reviewing the "Do Us a Flavour" varieties last year. On that occasion, I went out and bought the crisps myself. This time I'd get them for free. Following a brief phone call, a courier delivered a mock suitcase full of crisps to my door. So you can view everything that follows as essentially free publicity for Walkers, albeit the kind of publicity that explicitly states that their new crisps taste revolting. Well, most of them. A couple of them are quite interesting, as you'll see in a moment: ...

... Italian spaghetti bolognese/ Brazilian salsa

Tomato time. These both taste like scratch'n'sniff pizza aroma: a lame committee meeting of watered-down herbs. The "Brazilian salsa" has a slightly more sugary feel, but otherwise I couldn't tell the difference. My face was openly sobbing by this point, mind.


Spanish chicken paella

It would've been fun to annoyed the Spanish by releasing "maltreated donkey" or "slaughtered bull" flavours instead, but no: chicken paella it is. Amazingly, these actually taste like rice. And slightly like chicken. But they don't taste like chicken paella: more like chicken fried rice. Maybe Walkers were expecting China to qualify.


Irish stew

No.


French garlic baguette

Garlic Bread diluted by a factor of approximately 10,000. So weak and ineffectual, it's almost homeopathic. They missed a trick: a novelty "snail" or "frog's legs" flavour would at least have grim curiosity value, much like . . .


Australian BBQ kangaroo

See? You want to know what these taste like, don't you? A: watery barbecue sauce with a dim hint of meat. There's no actual kangaroo in them, so the "kangaroo" is delivered entirely by your subconscious. They could call it "boiled pilot's leg" and the effect would be similar. ...



Ta much, dear Glenn321