The Ultimate Ranking Of Plain Potato Chips

The world feels like it's going to shit. So my response, of course, was to grab every bag of potato chips I could find this weekend and rank them. Important work in trying times, I know.

To start, I needed to make some arbitrary rules. I only tried plain, salted potato chips. I decided not to include crinkle-cut chips, but I did include Pringle-style crisps, kettle-cooked chips, and classic chips. Finally, I didn't differentiate between reduced fat or organic options, nor between the various oils they were cooked in.

Ranking potato chips is not solo work. I grabbed some friends and we munched and argued, considering the mouthfeel and the brine, the earthiness and the crunch-to-flake ratio. After this long and arduous task, I rated the chips based on three factors:

• The flavor (including saltiness, potato taste, and oil flavor)
• The textural experience (the crunch, heft, thickness, and greasiness)
• The nostalgia factor (how did it make me feel, and what did it evoke?)

Here are my findings, ranked worst to best.

It's hard for a potato chip to be bad. And these certainly aren't bad, but I can't say they're good. The overwhelming flavor is that of old oil. The bag boasts three simple ingredients: potatoes, sunflower oil, and sea salt. When one of the three is off, it's hard to recover. The chips are well-salted, but the dark, muddy taste of stale sunflower oil takes the driver's seat.

This oil-based tragedy impacts the textural experience as well, leaving the chips feeling a little greasy, with a film of oil covering your lips and mouth after eating them. The kettle cook does help, however, because the chips stay crunchy.

The spuds at 7-Eleven suffered a similar fate to the Whole Foods chips, with burnt oil ruining the glorious potential of a potato. Salt came in as the saving grace here. These chips are slightly more salted than their Whole Foods cousins, so a bit of bright brininess could cut through the rancid oil taste.

While kettle cooking can create the best of chips (see the top-ranked chip on this list), it may also be the culprit for the old oil factor. While classic chips (like Lay's-style) are typically cooked on a conveyor belt, with consistent hot oil poured atop, kettle-style chips are batch-cooked, stirred in an oil-filled kettle. My inexpert hypothesis to explain these stale chips is overuse of the same oil.

Another flop for Mr. Bezos. These non-kettle counterparts from Whole Foods were fine, boring. They neither had the nostalgia factor that plays in a chip like Lay's favor nor any notable flavor or texture pluses. They could be saltier. Their extreme thinness means that after four or five chews they disintegrate into a paste and get stuck in your molars. In the quest for a hero chip, these were the boring, forgettable side character.

You've probably eaten a Pringle, but have you ever tried to describe one? A lightly salted crisp... and then what? You don't taste the potato. If anything it leaves the taste of raw starch and chemicals behind.

There are Pringle superfans out there, and I certainly have the nostalgia for them that many might: a childhood of stacking and duck-beak-making, a snack-sized tube arriving to save your grumbling tummy on a long plane ride, the perfect pop of the lid coming off. And while this combination of nostalgia and lab-devised addictiveness works to even get it to this point on the list, a true, objective tasting leaves a lot to be desired.

Trader Joe's has made a chip for someone who loves burnt chips. Does that person exist? Who knows, but TJ's continues to sell them. The bag claims that the chips are made with a "special variety of russet potato" that creates the dark, caramelized experience. Whether it's the result of a "special" potato or just burning potato chips, the result is sweet from the caramelized starches but veers toward bitterness from its cook time. While it might be great with something like french onion dip to enhance the roasted sweetness, on its own it's simply odd, and not what you're looking for when you reach for a bag of potato chips.

The texture on this chip was one of the best. Thick enough to hold up and crispy with a slight chew to remind you of the potato it once was.

The plus of these chips is that the branding makes you feel like a fit outdoorsman scaling the Rockies, rather than sitting on your couch eating potato chips. These would be the chips of choice of a flannel-clad, man-bunned hiker or a graying ski mom.

Marketing aside, the chip is a fine chip. It is under-salted, probably the least salty of all the chips judged. While there are glimmers of a grassiness thanks to the olive oil cook, it is not enough to wow. They achieve a nice heft, a lightness close to that of a Lay's with a sturdiness to avoid collapse. They are crispy, but to a fault, shattering and scarring the roof of your mouth with each bite.

These chips advertise that they're cooked in avocado oil (and that they're vegan, which in a potato chip probably doesn't need to be a prominent message?). The high smoke point of avocado oil means the chip is crispy without any greasiness or the acrid burnt/stale flavor some of the lower-ranked chips suffered from. What it also means is that the flavor of avocado oil comes through with nutty, grassy notes. It might not be what you had in mind for your classic chip, but it isn't off-putting.

The name says it's both "classic" and "original." It has a guy named Matt on the package telling you he moved all the way from Australia just to share these chips with you! Despite the zealous branding, sitting just outside of the top five, this is a yummy chip.

If you've ever eaten a chip and said you wish it had more of a raw potato flavor, this is the crisp for you. And while that may sound pejorative, it truly isn't. The Pringle-style chip has everything you wished a Pringle would have: flavor. It reminds you that despite the additional processes that go into making these crunchy, stackable wafers, it is, at its core, a potato-based snack. The benefits of a Pringle while exchanging the chemical flavor for a potato one make these a winner.

There's a reason these are a classic: It's a damn good potato chip with decades of highly funded food science research behind it to make it as addictive as possible. The saltiness burns the cuts on your lips and sends you straight back to summers by the pool.

If you're looking for the nontraditional potato chip experience, this is the chip for you. Terra is no stranger to frying root vegetables stunningly, and the lightly salted "Blues," made from purple potatoes, are no exception. There's an intensely nutty flavor to these that give you the experience of a chestnut more so than a potato.

Coupled with this unique flavor is the texture that ranked atop all 14 chips, in my book. They're cut barely thicker than most of the chips, and because the blue potato tends to be drier and starchier than a traditional varietal, they stay as crispy and light as you want, but the thickness makes way for the tiniest chew, a minuscule bounce, that nods to that deeply crispy french fry from the bottom of the tray.

My personal affinity for a kettle-style chip pushed these up the list, but Kettle is doing everything right. The Salem, Oregon company is synonymous, literally, with a great kettle-cooked chip. The chips are super salty and have a pleasant grease that sticks to your fingers and reminds you you're eating a deep-fried slice of potato. There are burns and bubbles and folded chips that provide a perfect crunch and make you feel like a grandmother made this, hunched over a copper kettle.

Imagine taking a Lay's, making it taste a little healthier, and putting it in a low oven for 20 minutes. The result would be this chip from Late July. It has a roasty flavor that adds an unexpected depth and is balanced with the perfect amount of salt. This touch of warmth coming from the toasted flavor takes the sunniness of a classic chip and brings it into a mature place. You could pair it with a jammy Zinfandel rather than a cheap, light beer.

As the name promises, it is thin and crispy, but there is also a flakiness to it that you don't often see. Crunching into it provides a shatter, almost like the hard edge of a well-laminated croissant.

This is everything you want a classic potato chip to be. The talented copywriter on the bag compares it to the classic wood-paneled station wagon of your childhood. Because I'm not a boomer, my cultural touchpoints are a little different, but it is the romanticized version of what a potato chip can be. It's the chip of sunscreen and watermelon, of blanket forts and pool games, of your friend's mom's Honda Odyssey with Lindsay Lohan's The Parent Trap playing on the tiny screen that folds down from the ceiling.

This is the chip you remember from your childhood that you haven't found again. It is thin and light but sturdy enough to hold its crispiness. It is salty, almost to the point that it burns your tongue, but a strong, cooked potato flavor still holds. It's a grabbable chip, one that makes you want to reach your fist into the back to shovel right into your mouth.

So, I'll admit to being biased. Before even doing the ranking, I pitched an ode to the Cape Cod potato chip. I expected these results. But before you lose complete faith in me, know this was corroborated by the taste-tester team of chip-eaters around me. Even with the fat handicap (having chosen the reduced-fat version) Cape Cod's perfect potato chip reigned supreme.

This is the belle of the ball. It is the chip to beat all chips. If aliens arrived and we had to feed them the best food America had to offer, I'd advocate for the Cape Cod chip. Move over, Eleven Madison Park.

What makes this chip stand out more than anything is the consistency. You're never going to get the disappointing chip that's missing salt or the weird oily one at the bottom of the bag. They have the heft and crunch of a great kettle chip with little air pockets that keep them light. They don't congeal into a paste when you chew or feel like a stone at the bottom of your stomach. They stay so crispy that even when you pry the bits out of your teeth with your tongue, you're still biting down. You taste the potato, but not too much. You don't taste any oil at all. And the salt—the key to this beautiful kingdom—is there, but it doesn't stay on your fingers. It reminds you of the sea, but it doesn't overpower. It elevates the players around it without trying to be the star.

If the world is, in fact, going to shit, at least we've had the chance to experience Cape Cod potato chips on the ride.