IHOP's Nasty Pancake Chips

Posted by palabomeno on May 7, 2024

We are starting to really hate tie in chip flavors by now. We know that they’re nothing new, not even when they started becoming the primary way the Frito-Lay company develops new flavors. But we would prefer it if some of the tie-ins made sense. Sure, this is a great way to try out weird and possibly unpleasant chip flavors! We loved Wasabi and Soy Sauce! Some of those Tastes of America chips were pretty good! But in what universe do you think of potato chips and IHOP in the same thought?

Well, it’s this universe.


The IHOP chips. They are pink.

This is the only picture we took of these stupid things. We forgot to take a picture of the actual chips.

Yes, Lay’s IHOP Rooty Tooty Fresh 'N Fruity “Strawberry-Topped Pancakes With Syrup & Bacon Naturally & Artificially Flavored” Potato Chips are available on Walmart store shelves, and the world may be a little worse off for it. These chips bear the promise that they have “World Famous Breakfast Flavor”! Well, if the Rooty Tooty Fresh 'N Fruity is famous for anything it’s not breakfast flavor, it’s its ridiculous name. It’s just strawberries on pancakes with bacon - those are flavors we know very well separately, but adding in “potato” to that is a little weird.

And, indeed, these chips taste a little weird. They start out kind of okay. It has the exact strawberry flavor of Frankenberry cereal combined with the exact bacon taste of the fakest imitation bacon bits you’ve ever tasted. The pancake flavor is more like a plain maple syrup, without any sort of butter or actual pancake flavor. And all of this is normal stuff, flavors we’re familiar with! Except for the potato.

The flavor of these is kind of like if an idiot heard latkes were “potato pancakes” and poured on the syrup. The potato chip flavor is unignorable and at complete odds with the rest of the taste. And it’s not the syrup flavor that’s even the problem, nor the bacon flavor - it’s the strawberry. The sweet strawberry fails to make a satisfying sweet-salty combo and instead fights for your tongue. These may have actually been good chips if it was just syrup and bacon. The strawberry-potato combo ruins the entire thing.

We bought these with our own hard-earned money and couldn’t finish them. We don’t like wasting food here ate Eggware.XYZ; if we regret a snack purchase, we’lll try to eat it all out of sheer sunk cost fallacy. These we threw away, perfectly good potato chips and we threw them away. I feel like it’s harsh to say these are “inedible”. There’s got to be some complete Frankenberry Freak out there who has these as their favorite chips ever. That’s definitely, definitely not us though. These are straight gross.

Categories: food

Tagged: 2024 chips ihop strawberry


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