Starbucks Kettle Chips Sea Salt & Balsamic Vinegar

Starbucks Kettle Chips Sea Salt and Balsamic Vinegar cost £1.55 and carry 210 calories a bag with 0.64g of salt. Kettle cooked crisps with a balsamic vinegar seasoning.

Barley in the allergen list is the thing to notice, and it produces an odd combination. This bag carries a vegan label and also contains gluten, because malt vinegar seasoning is made from barley. Vegan and gluten free are separate questions and this is the clearest illustration of that on the menu: the two vegan crisp bags split exactly on it.

0.64g of salt is the highest of the four bags, nearly double the lightly salted at 0.36g. Vinegar seasonings need salt to carry them, and the sharpness masks it well enough that this rarely tastes like the saltiest option even though it is.

At 210 calories it is the heaviest of the four, though the spread across all of them is only twelve calories, so flavour rather than the figure should decide it. Saturated fat at 1g is the lowest of the range.

Vinegar crisps are also the ones that suffer most from a stale bag, since the acidity fades faster than salt or cheese seasoning does. A bag past its best tastes flat rather than sharp, which is a more noticeable decline than the other three flavours show.

Fibre at 1.7g is the lowest of the four bags, and protein at 1.7g is also the lowest. Sugar sits at 0.5g, most of it from the balsamic reduction in the seasoning, which is where the faint sweetness behind the acidity comes from.

Balsamic rather than plain malt vinegar is a real distinction on a crisp bag. Balsamic is aged and sweetened by reduction, so it brings a rounder, less aggressive acidity than the sharp malt vinegar of a traditional salt and vinegar crisp. Anyone who finds ordinary vinegar crisps harsh will get on with these considerably better.

Vegetarian and vegan labels both apply. Prices reach £2.20 on delivery.