The PopCorners Flavor You Should Leave At The Store

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Just as popular chip brands like Lays and Cheetos have baked versions of their fried counterparts, other brands are singularly dedicated to producing healthy snacks with a decadent taste. PopCorners is a healthy chip brand that has produced a hybrid between popcorn and corn chips. You get a rich corn taste and satisfying crunch of a corn chip with the light and airy feeling of air-popped popcorn. And like any chip brand worth its salt, PopCorners come in a variety of flavors, which we have sampled and ranked.

According to our ranking of seven PopCorners flavors, the kettle corn is the flavor that you should leave at the store. Since all PopCorners have the same triangular shape and crispy, light texture, our ranking was based on flavor and how closely the flavor resembled the original dish. So with kettle corn, we were expecting a well-balanced burst of sweet and savory. Unfortunately, the kettle corn PopCorners were neither balanced nor flavorful. Upon the first bite, we got a fleeting hint of sweetness and nothing else. There was no salty counterbalance or even a savory popcorn flavor. Perhaps if there had been a little more salt, we would've appreciated the sweetness of the sugar and the savoriness of the corn. Instead, these chips left our taste buds grasping to taste anything at all. PopCorners needs to go back to the drawing board with this flavor.

PopCorners are available at all of the biggest grocery chains, not to mention Amazon. So we looked for reviews from other customers to see if they were as disappointed as we were. While the majority of reviews on Amazon, Target, and Walmart were favorable, there were also a fair share of complaints about the flavor, or lack thereof.

Many reviews equated the lack of flavor with a stale taste. One Walmart review stated, "These felt like styrofoam crumbles in my mouth ... they tasted very stale and not a hint of sweet or salty." More to the point, an Amazon review said, "I have eaten kettle corn at many county fairs and this is not close. Very little sugar or salt taste." Since we understand that PopCorners markets its products as healthier, we know not to expect a chip loaded with salt, sugar, and butter. But, PopCorners has managed to master other flavors with the same nutritional parameters.

Perhaps PopCorners fails to capture complementary flavors because the flavors we liked the most were either all savory or all sweet. If you're looking for a tasty blend of sweet and salty, you could buy a bag of each of the highly rated cinnamon crunch and sea salt flavors and mix them together. If your heart is set on kettle corn, you're better off checking out our ranking of other kettle corn flavored snacks.