Prawn cocktail should be tangy. It should be sweet. It should taste pink, somehow, in defiance of synaesthesia. Walkers’ version achieves the colour and fumbles everything else.
The tang is there but muted. The sweetness is there but restrained. Everything that should pop instead whispers. It’s prawn cocktail through a filter, the Instagram version of a flavour that should be vivid and unapologetic.
Compare this to Golden Wonder’s prawn cocktail, which commits fully to the artificial pink fantasy. Walkers holds back, as always, producing something that technically qualifies without ever satisfying.
The nostalgia trap
People buy these because they remember prawn cocktail crisps from childhood. But memory flatters. The actual product, eaten now, with adult taste buds and adult expectations, reveals itself as thin in every sense. Thin crisps, thin flavour, thin experience.
Nostalgia is a powerful sales tool. It’s not a quality guarantee.
