What If I Just Stopped Eating Spicy Snacks?

I've mentioned here many times that I'm not a huge spicy food fan. In fact I would describe my spice tolerance and low, only recently getting a little closer to moderate. I've always had mixed feelings about eating spicy snacks. I know that I'm probably not going to enjoy them, but I feel like I would be doing people reading visiting my site a disservice by not reviewing them occasionally. It's a really weird situation, I know I'm not going to like it that much, but I feel like I have to eat it.

Check out my latest spicy review.

When Vegetables Collide

When I come across a snack like these Lay's cucumber potato chips, I wonder. I wonder if snack companies come up with their ideas on paper, or in the kitchen. I wonder if someone writes down all of the weird ideas they can think of when it comes to flavour combinations, or if a food professional taste tests millions of ideas only choosing their favourite. I feel like the creative team at companies like Lays might be made up of more writers than cooks. It's not that I didn't like these chips, it just doesn't seem like something a sane person would develop in a kitchen.

Check out why these chips are so weird by reading my latest review.

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Time To Find Out If The Real Thing Is Better

Have you ever thought about how much your potato chips actually taste like the flavour advertised on the package. I didn't, until now.

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When Snack Companies Meet

When snack companies work together it seems very polarizing. I feel like these snack combinations either fail miserably or succeed beyond any expectations. I think it all depends on the amount of thought put into these snack combinations. The first step is that the combination has to make sense. The second is that they don't necessarily give what makes them best as an individual snack. Instead these snacks have to give what makes best for the combination. I often find that flavours and textures can clash rather than work together. This is all to say that this is truly a meeting of snacks that truly makes sense, and both contribute the perfect elements to each other.

Click here to find out how Smartfood and Lay's potato chips work together.

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It's Time To Eat Something Stupid - Extreme Chili Lay's Potato Chips

Once again we're here with another episode of Chris, Why Would You Eat That?!!, and once again I'm eating something spicy. I'm not sure why I'm drawn in by spicy foods, I certainly don't enjoy eating them.

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Classic Candies I Haven’t Reviewed And Why - Part 2

Lucky Elephant Popcorn - I've always been a little bit nervous about reviewing Lucky Elephant Popcorn. I've always had fond childhood memories of this treat, but I'm not sure it actually holds up on its own. I'm thinking that if I break down Lucky Elephant Popcorn, and look at it objectively, it's just sweet, bland popcorn. Sure it's bright pink, but is that enough?


Regular Lays or Ruffles, or Pringles - Every time I find myself in a store, facing the wall of potato chips, I always seem to find a flavour so interesting, or weird that I have to try it. I do eat regular potato chips, but only at parties, and almost always with some kind of dip. Some day I might have to go out and specifically buy plain potato chips to review, but only after I've exhausted all the other amazing flavours available.


Hot Tamales - I don't like spicy food. I see Hot Tamales as the quintessential spicy candy. It's not the hottest candy out there, but it's really the grandfather of hot candies. I actually think candies that are hotter than Hot Tamales are more interesting to me because I'm curious as to how hot they really are. Hot Tamales are hot enough that I'm scared to eat them, but not hot enough to make me interested.


Cherry PEZ - I've reviewed three flavours of PEZ so far, orange, grape and lemon. I've enjoyed each one of these flavours, but cherry has been my favourite flavour since childhood. The reason I've never reviewed cherry PEZ is because I've haven't selected the flavour of a package of PEZ for as long as I've been doing this site. Any PEZ candies that I've reviewed on this site came with a PEZ dispenser. I guess it's just been my luck so far (or maybe they never package PEZ dispensers with cherry PEZ), but I have not tasted cherry PEZ in years.

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It's Another Snack Review - IWAB "Sweet" (Sweet Hearts?)

One of the biggest problems about reviewing candies and snacks from all over the world, is figuring out exactly what I'm eating.  This can be a problem because I won't know what to expect (although this can be an advantage sometimes too), or it can be that I don't really know how to eat it (see this video for the best example), or as is the case with today's new review, I don't really know what it's called. While not knowing the name of a treat might seem like a small problem, it becomes a big problem when I'm trying to post the reviews on our candycritic.org. I take my best guess, and sometimes just make up the name based on what the foreign writing kind of looks like (as is this case).

If you happen to speak and read Thai, I would greatly appreciate a translation of this package. Until I get one it's going to keep the name IWAB.

Click here to find out how these IWAB snacks did.

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It's A New Chip Review, And It's Not Great - Lay’s Cooling Sensation "Melon Bingsu Flavor"

Today's new review is one that you'd think would be obvious. It's obvious that it shouldn't work, I mean it's melon flavoured, menthol potato chips. Sometimes I get snacks like this and I'm surprised that it does actually work, this was not one of those times. I ate these chips, and they were pretty gross. They're so gross that I couldn't finish the entire bag (it was a small bag as well). I didn't throw them out though, I have some friends coming over this weekend for a round of Pandemic, and they're going to get to sample the worst chips ever made.

As an added bonus, this Thursday I'll be posting another review of another "cooling sensation" flavour of Lay's potato chips. I have a little more hope that these won't be nearly as gross, but I'm not totally confident.

Click here to read about the worst chips I've ever eaten.

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I Have A New Fake Flavour That I Don't Like, Thanks To This New Snack Review - Lay's 2 in 1 "Grilled Shrimp and Green Sauce"

It's important to establish this concept before I continue, there are two kinds of flavours in the snacking world, realistic flavours (sometimes real) and fake flavours. Realistic flavours are pretty self explanatory, they actually taste like the thing they're supposed to be representing. Fake flavours don't, but that's doesn't mean they're bad, it just means that the flavour evokes the thing it's supposed to represents more than it actually copies the flavour. When it comes to fake flavours, I actually enjoy most of them, the two exceptions are fake watermelon and fake banana flavouring. After writing this review however I can now add fake shrimp to this list.  I don't mind shrimp, but I generally dislike anything that's shrimp flavoured.

Click here to read the review where I made this discovery.

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Yet Another Entry In Our Latest Review-A-Thon

Some reviews make me nervous.  On many occasions I've either received or purchased snacks that make me really nervous about eating them. This bag of chips was certainly in that category. The main reason I'm afraid of eating most snacks, hot spice.  I don't like burning my mouth off, but for some reason people in the candy world love to make hot and spicy treats.  I've been trying for years to improve my tolerance, but I've still got a long way to go.

Click here to find out if I had anything to be afraid of.

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Candy In The Media

Likely the most culturally inappropriate potato chip commercial ever.

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Most Memorable Candies Reviewed In 2016

2016 has been a pretty big year of change for us at candycritic.org.  Actually it's been a return to lack of change, if you look at it technically.  This is the year we returned home after 6 years away.  The goal, to get back in touch with my Canadian roots, with a few stops in the US to make sure I haven't missed any other North American things.  Because of this change, our reviews have been pretty eclectic as well.  We've had candies from all over the world, but over the last few months, a focus on North America.

I feel like my palette has evolved with living abroad and I look at North American candy a little differently. Sometimes I think I see it as more nostalgic (particularly during the holidays) and sometimes I see it as so advanced and confusing.  It really depends on my mood, and the candy.

This post is all about looking back at old reviews.  I've picked 5 that are not the best or worst, but some of the most memorable reviews of 2016. They're each memorable for different reasons, some good, and some bad but all made me happy that I was a Candy Critic.

Worst Candy - Remember in that paragraph above where I said that this list does not contain the "best or worst" candies, well I kind of lied. This durian candy might be the worst tasting candy I'd eaten all year.  It was so bad that it was memorable, and that's why it's on this list.  If you're not familiar with durian, it's a fruit found in Asia.  This fruit smells so bad, that many airlines will not let you bring them aboard.  I can only describe the smell as being similar to sweaty gym socks, rotten onions, and burning tires.  The connoisseur of this fruit claims that although it smells really bad, the flavour is smooth and creamy. The problem is that the smell is so pungent that it's really hard to taste anything but the gross smell.  Needless to say, these candies while being very gross, pretty much match the fruit perfectly.

Click here to read the Durian Cream Filled Chocolate review.

Craziest Chip That Worked -There seems to be a trend these days of making sweet flavoured potato chips.  Sweet and savory in the potato chip world is nothing new.  When I was a kid I remember tasting my first chocolate covered potato chip, and although it was a delicacy, it was around.  Today we see chocolate covered pretzels and sweet flavoured potato chips at our local corner store.  The chocolate covered snacks work most of the time, the sweet flavoured chips aren't always as successful. These chips not only worked, but they worked in a very unique way.  They combined two flavours that worked together, butter and honey, then mixed them with potato chips.  The butter works with potatoes as well, but this is the first time I've seen it matched with chips, and it works. These chips not only tasted great, but they made me think about new possibilities in potato chip flavours.

Click here to read the Lay's "Honey Butter" review.

Strange And Memorable Candy - I don't know how much I liked, or disliked this candy, but I seem to remember about the adventure of trying to find it.  This candy was bought as a result of me trying to find candy in India.  It was one of our last adventures when we were living abroad, and I wanted to find something that represented our trip to India.  These stick out to me because they remind me of our secondary mission in India, to eat as many different varieties of mango as possible.  That mission was a great success, even thought this candy wasn't.

Click here to read the Mango Papdams review.

Candy Most Likely To Make Me Enjoy Licorice - This candy represents two things for me.  First of all it's a step towards me trying to gain a taste for licorice.  In the last few years, living abroad, I decided to try and change my palette in two ways, one to gain a taste for licorice, and secondly to try and tolerate hotter foods.  Both of these have been fairly successful so far, and I felt that the fact that I kind of liked these chocolate covered licorice candies was proof.  The second thing these candies represented to me was those chance meetings where things go really well.  Allison was in New York at some meetings (I tagged along), and there was a small reception.  I talked to a few people at this reception, often about candy.  I met one man who was from Iceland, and I mentioned to him that I'd never eaten candy from Iceland before.  He mentioned that he happened to have a giant bag of Icelandic candy with him to share with anybody who might be interested.  I ended up leaving with a big bag of puffin eggs and a great story.

Click here to read the Freyju Djupur Sukkuladihjupadur Lakkris (Also known as Puffin Eggs) review.

Most Surprising Variety - It's very rare that a "normal" candy makes my list of most memorable, but these Skittles really worked well.  First of all I first tried them in the fall, actually I first tried them while walking through Gatineau park in Quebec while walking a trail during the fall.  Gatineau park is world famous for the beautiful fall colours, and this day did not fail.  I was walking along eating these Skittles and the flavour just worked so perfectly.  Even though a few of them aren't orchard fruit from where I live. The fruit choice was perfect, and the timing was perfect.  This doesn't always happen when I'm eating candy, but when it does it's truly magical.

Click here to read the Skittles "Orchards" review.

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