Trying Walker’s WEIRD Sandwich Crisps (so you don’t have to)

I love trying British snacks, including the ones that sound like a terrible idea. In 2024, a message from Kimberly in our community chat alerted me to Walkers’ limited-edition sandwich crisps with Heinz. Sausage sarnie and ketchup, roast chicken and mayo, cheese toastie and beans. Who asked for this?

I suspected I was going to hate them, which apparently wasn’t enough to stop me buying them. The cheese-and-beans version even gave me a little hope, while a bonus bag of Cheez-It Snapped had me thinking I might finally get a familiar North American snack in the UK. Neither hope survived particularly well.

Sausage sarnie with tomato ketchup

The first bag had something oily on the outside, which was an unpromising start. I didn’t know what it was, so I tried to avoid it and got on with tasting. These were labelled sausage sarnie with Heinz tomato ketchup, and they really did taste like sausage and ketchup. I don’t know how they managed that.

The ketchup part reminded me of ketchup chips back in Canada. Those weren’t my favourite growing up, but I’d still eat them, so this part was fairly familiar and quite nice. Then came the horrible artificial sausage flavour. It was recognisable as sausage, just in a way I didn’t particularly want in a crisp.

I gave them two out of six sarnies with ketchup falling out of the bottom. My rating systems are very serious, obviously. I’d definitely eaten worse, and these were moreish in a slightly disgusting way, but the weird sausage flavour kept getting in the way. On returning to them later, I also noticed how sweet the ketchup tasted.

Roast chicken with mayonnaise

Next came roast chicken with Heinz mayonnaise. I like mayo, although I couldn’t remember trying a mayonnaise crisp before. The combination had a familiar creamy flavour that reminded me of sour cream and onion chips, a North American flavour I know well, followed by another odd artificial-meat taste.

This time it was something like fake rosemary meat. I’d had worse, but these weren’t good, and I almost thought the sausage ones were better. That surprised me. The chicken-and-mayo bag got five out of nine and a half jars of mayo, which tells you rather more about my mood than it does about a sensible ranking table.

I do appreciate this kind of novelty crisp, though. I feel like I encounter far more strange, limited-edition flavours here than I did in Canada, and I love that someone bothers making them. Even when I think the result is gross, a weird little snack experiment is still fun.

Cheese toastie with beans was the worst

I’d had some hope for this one because British cheese crisps can be good. There are fancy cheddar combinations and plenty of other varieties I enjoy, so the cheese base sounded fine. Heinz beans might add something tomatoey. That was the optimistic version of events.

What I actually tasted was cold Heinz beans. Close your eyes and think about that flavour, then imagine it as a crisp. The other two bags were things I could stomach, even if I didn’t love them, but this was much worse. I was surprised by how bad it was.

These got minus four out of eight. I’d bought them on sale and still felt robbed, which was an exaggerated reaction to a snack, but an accurate description of how much I disliked it. Cheese toastie and beans was the clear loser for me.

The Cheez-It bonus round

While buying the sandwich crisps, I’d spotted Cheez-It Snapped Double Cheese. I love the crunchy, salty, square Cheez-Its I remember from North America and hadn’t been able to find them here, so seeing that brand was exciting. This was a different, thinner-looking version, but I wanted to give it a chance.

The texture was excellent. Thin, crunchy and crispy, exactly the kind of crunch I wanted. The cheese flavour didn’t match my memory, though, and eventually I worked out what it reminded me of. During my first UK job at a college, I’d eaten instant lunches made with kettle water, including a vaguely remembered macaroni-and-cheese one. This tasted like that instant cheese.

I couldn’t pin down the exact lunch brand, but the flavour memory was definite enough to spoil the snack for me. Three out of seven depression bags of cheese. Maybe my expectations had been too high, but I was disappointed. At least the whole taste test delivered what I enjoy about trying something strange, even if I wouldn’t choose any of these bags for the flavour alone.

Watch I tried Walkers sandwich crisps, and the beans were a mistake on YouTube.