Salt and vinegar should be an experience. It should make your face react. It should leave evidence on your lips. Walkers Salt & Vinegar does none of these things.
What it does is gesture vaguely toward vinegar. There’s sourness, technically. If you concentrate, you can identify it as salt and vinegar flavoured. But the commitment isn’t there. The intensity isn’t there. The joy isn’t there.
This is salt and vinegar for people who don’t actually like salt and vinegar. Training wheels flavour. The version you give to children before they’re ready for the real thing. Except Walkers serves it to everyone, forever, as if the nation’s palate never developed past age seven.
The thin crisp format makes it worse. Good salt and vinegar needs structural integrity to handle the acidic seasoning. Walkers’ fragile crisps can barely hold themselves together, let alone support bold flavour.
Somewhere in Leicester, there’s a dial labelled “vinegar intensity” and someone has taped it at 4 out of 10. They could turn it up. They choose not to. Every bag is a choice to underwhelm.
Buy literally any other salt and vinegar crisp.
