Starbucks Lightly Salted Popcorn

Starbucks Lightly Salted Popcorn costs £1.75 and carries 88 calories a bag with 0.2g of salt. Plain popped corn with a light seasoning.

At 88 calories it is the lightest snack Starbucks sells and less than half of any bag of crisps here. The lightly salted Kettle Chips carry 206 for a comparable bag, which is the whole argument for popcorn as a format: air rather than potato, and nothing deep fried.

It is also the only snack in the category carrying a gluten free label. Three of the four crisp bags qualify on ingredients but are not labelled, the balsamic vinegar bag declares barley outright, and every biscuit here contains wheat. For a coeliac reader this is the one straightforward option on the shelf.

Vegan and vegetarian labels both apply, and no allergens are declared at all, which is unusual enough to be worth stating. Sugar is 0.1g, which is nothing worth counting, and fat is 3.5g with 0.3g saturated.

Popcorn earns its fibre honestly, unlike most things that claim it. The hull and the germ of the corn kernel survive popping intact, so a bag delivers whole grain rather than processed starch, which is the genuine nutritional difference between this and a crisp.

Air is what makes the calorie figure work and it is worth understanding how much of it there is. A popped kernel is roughly forty times the volume of the raw grain, so a bag that looks generous holds a small weight of actual corn. That is the whole trick of popcorn as a snack: the portion looks like a lot and weighs almost nothing.

It is the one bag on the shelf that suits almost every dietary requirement at once. Prices reach £2.20 on delivery. The sweet and salty version is the other popcorn at 139 calories.