Beefy. Not beef. Beefy.
The diminutive suffix is doing important work here. Seabrook isn’t promising beef flavour. They’re promising beef-adjacent, beef-ish, somewhere in the general direction of beef if you squint. It’s expectation management through grammar.
And vaguely is exactly what they deliver. There’s meatiness. Yeasty, savoury, Bovril-esque. It registers as “probably meat-flavoured” without specifying which meat or how it was prepared. Beefy is the right word. It’s the flavour of beef as a concept rather than beef as an ingredient.
The Seabrook texture problems persist, obviously. That dense crinkle cut chew, the claggy mouthfeel, the sense that you’re working harder than crisps should require. Beef flavouring doesn’t mask these issues. The savoury heaviness actually amplifies them, creating a chewing experience that feels more like obligation than pleasure.
In a multipack, these are the ones left at the end. The bag you eat because it’s there, not because you want it. They exist to provide variety, not satisfaction.
Beefy by name, barely there by nature.
