From Our Family to your mouth

In my previous salt & vinegar chips review, I tasted some that I had bought while preparing for a trip up north. This time I taste chips that I bought while up north.

My venture to the northwoods brought me to Spooner and I stopped in at Schmitz's Economart hoping to find some locally-sourced wild rice, artisanal pemmican, or a new brand of salt & vinegar potato chips. I succeeded on this last count only, although I happened up a nice loaf of cranberry wild rice bread as well.

I hadn't been to Spooner in 40 years or so but Schmitz's Economart has been in that area since 1937 so it's quite possible I'd been to a previous incarnation of the store as a boy. It was an impressive place for a town of 2,600. Or a city of 260,000, for that matter. They stocked a fair number of trendy organic products and things like brown rice syrup that I wouldn't expect at a store up north.

I found foods from the Our Family brand including salt & vinegar chips. I've never seen their products in Madison, as best I can recall, but they're available in most of the continental U.S. outside of large coastal cities and the South. Their Facebook page links them to the SpartanNash Company which owns grocery stores, brands, and does wholesale food distribution. They're out of Michigan.

The bag is revealing in 2 ways. First, it says that the it was distributed by Pique Brands which I presume is another subsidiary of SpartanNash. Gotta love how "Our Family" is really just another Giganto Corp. Second thing is that the ingredient list has neither vinegar nor acetic acid on it. Instead we have malic acid and sodium (sodi-yum!) diacetate. I see here that sodium diacetate is a salt of acetic acid so I guess it counts. I don't recall ever seeing a salt & vinegar chip that didn't have vinegar or acetic acid listed as an ingredient.

Sticking my nose inside the bag and inhaling, I smelled a lot of oil and a slightly lesser amount of starchy spud goodness. Taking a deeper breath, I managed to sniff out a bit of tang. The chips were mainly a darkish yellow in color with some spots that were more of a light gold.

These are kettle chips and they had the requisite crunch to them. While they were on the salty side, the sour tang was rather mellow. I liked the potato flavor but it seemed restrained. Normally I chew a few chips and move the resulting paste around on my tongue and I get that creamy, toasty, starchy flavor coming through loud and clear. But with these, that flavor was dialed down. I wonder if that's because of the variety of potatoes used. Or perhaps one of the other ingredients did something to my tongue so that it registered a duller kind of spud flavor.

Regardless, I'd rate these chips as good but not great. The lack of vinegary tang being the biggest culprit.