A few years back, Japanese snack maker Koikeya released a series of fruit-flavored chips. They were billed as a "breakfast snack," but mostly got attention for their novelty blend of potato and peach. It was interesting but made for a weird flavor combination. Was that the end of fruit-flavored crisps? Of course not.
Yamayoshi has teamed up with long-running pineapple candy Pine to create a limited-edition pineapple potato chip. The snack (¥130) is sweet and fruity, which is to be expected when teaming up with a candy maker. Can that help push these past previous experiments in fruity chips?
Sort of. It turns out these pineapple chips aren't actually that sweet, which was my biggest concern, but in fact they are just subtle and pleasant. Maybe I'm showing my personal bias here, but I also think the sharper taste of pineapple (or an artificial version of it) works better than orange or peach. So this snack represents a step up in some ways, though it still suffers from an imbalance. The initial taste is all potato, and the pineapple mostly lingers on afterward. It still comes off as strange, and makes me think this is a good point to end these efforts.
