The Crisp Ladder 2026: 24 New UK Snack Flavours, Blind-Tasted and Scored Without Mercy

Twenty-four new crisp and snack flavours landed on UK shelves this year. Most are perfectly pleasant. A few are quietly insulting. And the bag that beat everything on our table costs £1.25.

We bought the lot — supermarket own-label, big-name heritage brands, corner-shop imports and the odd things lurking by the till — stripped the packaging and put them in front of a panel of six. Nobody saw a brand. Nobody read a 'bold new flavour' badge. Nobody was allowed to say 'but the bag is nice'.

How we scored: 20 points, no rounding up

Each bag was judged on three things:

• Flavour, out of 10. Does it taste of what it claims? Would you go back for a second handful, or are you just eating because the bowl is there?
• Crunch, out of 5. The first snap, plus whether it still snaps five minutes into a bowl.
• Value, out of 5. Price per 100g, weighed against how fast the bag empties.

Twenty is the ceiling. Nothing hit twenty. Anything under 10 got binned mid-session, which felt wasteful until we tasted the bottom five.

We also ran a 'handful test' on everything: how many you eat before you stop noticing you're eating them. A crisp that vanishes without registering scores badly, even when the flavour is technically accurate. That is most of the middle of this list.

The top five: worth a repeat buy

1st — Chip-shop curry, 150g, £1.25. Score: 18/20. The winner. Warm turmeric, a flicker of sweetness, then a proper vinegar tang at the finish that stops it going cloying. Big, even seasoning — no dusty bag-end, no bland first handful. The crunch is thin and sharp rather than thick and mealy, and it held up in a bowl for the full session. At 83p per 100g it is cheaper than most of the 'premium' bags that finished below it. Our panel described it, unprompted, as 'a Friday night in a bag'. Buy the multipack.

2nd — Smoked paprika and honey, 125g, £1.60. Score: 16/20. Sweet-savoury and confident. The honey reads as a glaze rather than sugar, and the paprika is smoky without going ashtray. Slightly greasier than the winner, slightly moreish for it.

3rd — Roast beef and horseradish, 150g, £1.75. Score: 15.5/20. The horseradish actually arrives at the back of your nose, which almost never happens with a novelty flavour. Big umami hit. Points docked purely on price — you are paying a Sunday-carvery premium for a Tuesday-night crisp.

4th — Kimchi and sesame, 110g, £1.50. Score: 15/20. Tangy, funky, sesame-forward. The smallest bag on the table and the fastest to disappear, which is both a compliment and the reason it is fourth.

5th — Salt and cracked black pepper, thick cut, 150g, £1.40. Score: 14.5/20. No tricks, no marketing department, just a properly seasoned thick-cut crisp that can handle a dip. There is a reason this style keeps winning — and this one is the benchmark for the year.

The middle: fine, forgettable, fine

Eleven of the twenty-four scored between 10 and 14. That is the crisp equivalent of a shrug. In there you will find two cheese-and-onion rebrands that taste identical to each other and to the originals, a piri piri bag whose heat peaks at 'mild annoyance', and a genuinely decent salt-and-vinegar that lost points for a bag so full of air it could double as a pillow.

Positions six to twelve were separated by half a point in several cases. At that stage you are not really ranking flavour, you are ranking mood.

The bin-it club

24th — Truffle and parmesan, 100g, £2.25. Score: 6/20. Twenty-two pence per gram of actual food and it tastes of a scented candle. The panel's most-used word was 'perfume'. The second most-used word was 'why'.

23rd — Loaded cheeseburger, 150g, £1.50. Score: 6.5/20. Pickle, mustard, cheese dust and sugar — all detectable, none of them together. Tastes like a burger described down a phone line.

22nd — Sour cream and chive, 'extra crunchy', 130g, £1.65. Score: 7/20. The crunch did not survive two minutes. The chive was doing all the work; the sour cream never turned up.

21st — Mango chilli, 120g, £1.35. Score: 7.5/20. Not badly made, just too sweet — closer to a dessert than a snack. One taster called it 'crisp sherbet', and it was not entirely a compliment.

20th — Black garlic, 100g, £2.00. Score: 8/20. Interesting for four crisps. Then it becomes a chore. Turns out umami has a limit.

The corner-shop tax, and how to shop this list

The two most expensive bags on the table both finished in the bottom five. Meanwhile the top three all sit under £1.75, and the winner is hovering around meal-deal money. New flavours always arrive in the big shops first, priced up as a launch, then quietly drift down after a few months — so if something on this list catches your eye at full whack, give it a season.

Watch the pence-per-100g on the shelf edge rather than the sticker price. A £2.25 bag can be worse value than a £1.25 bag twice over, and sharing bags are only a bargain if you would actually share.

What this year's snack aisle is telling us

Three themes came through clearly in the panel notes. Heat is now standard rather than a novelty. Fermented flavours — kimchi, black garlic, vinegar-forward everything — are the direction of travel. And 'fakeaway' flavours (curry sauce, burger, kebab) live or die on whether they taste like the real thing or like a description of it.

The winning bag was neither clever nor expensive. It tasted right, it cost £1.25, and it left you wanting another handful. That is the whole job.