We purchased a plastic tube of Lay’s Stax Sour Cream & Onion Flavor Potato Crisps a while back for evaluation. The chips themselves resemble the original Lay’s Stax flavor in terms of color (a light potato yellow that passes a good bit of light), uniformity (near perfect hyperbolic paraboloid shapes), and stack-ability (although these cans stack better when stood vertically, end-to-end, than when laid horizontally and lengthwise on top of each other). The only visual difference between this and the original flavor, are the dark-colored green speckles that sparsely adorn these sour cream and onion potato chips.
While Lay’s Stax seem to crumble in the can more easily than the Pringles, we like the thicker chips that hold more salsa without breaking apart, and making a tomato-pepper mess on our shirts and jackets.
Benefits, Pros, Advantages, and Features
- Easy grip can. We appreciate the shape of the plastic canister (oval shape). You can more firmly grasp the can when shaped this way.
- Satisfying. Their sufficiently-strong onion and sour cream flavor bests those bouts of afternoon snack-cravings and late-night munchies.
- Very crispy and crunchy. Lay’s Stax crisps have a highly rigid, snappy crunch such that one-at-a-time in the mouth yields more than enough crunch. Two or three at a time becomes too hard to chew. One or two at once is plenty.
- Low fatty taste. This product is neither oily nor greasy.
- Authentic sour cream taste without as much sin. The quite realistic onion and sour cream flavor, unlike the more traditional bagged chips, never becomes monotonous. Indeed, you get that delicious chip-dip taste here without all those extra calories and saturated fat found in actual sour cream-based chip dips.
- Strong chips. Plenty thick are these potato chips. Hold lots of dip and sauce.
- Widely available. This product is easy to find at many larger food stores. However, you may not see the sour cream & onions flavor everywhere that you’d find the original flavor, as stores with limited space favor the original flavor over the others when stocking their shelves.
- Airtight can keeps chips fresh. The freshness-locking plastic can, with the flexible plastic resealable lid, indeed keeps the chips from losing their revered crunchiness for weeks after the initial can-opening.
- Long shelf life. The chips, if kept in the can with the lid securely in place, keep for months, or at the least, several weeks after opening. Thus, this is a great snack food to stock pile, whether you’ve opened it or not.
- Quite stackable for easy stockpiling. The cans may be stacked vertically or horizontally in many rows, without worry that the potato crisps inside will be crushed.
- Affordable. We found this Lay’s product at a nearby Walmart for roughly $1.50 per can, which seemed a pretty decent price, and competitive with similar snack products.
- Increased popularity of canned potato chips. We appreciate this expanding plethora of multiple canned potato chip flavors, of which this sour cream and onion flavor was a part.
- Stackable chips. Like the original Lay’s Stax flavor, these sour cream and onion chips are all the same shape, which simplifies consuming them. You can pick up a large stack in the palm of your hand, and stuff them into your mouth without much spillage. But as noted, eating one at a time is ourmodus operandi with this snack because these potato chips are significantly thicker than the Pringles.
Disadvantages, Cons, Problems, and Concerns
- Crumble easily. The chips break apart in the can a lot if you jostle the can very much. Though I like these thicker-than-Pringles potato chips, perhaps the added weight per chip actually increases their sensitivity to breakage.
- Not a low calorie food snack. Due to the fat and salt content, We would not classify this food as a healthy food. So eat them in moderation to maintain your weight control.
- High sodium, high fat. They have much fat and sodium in our view, at 9 grams and 190 milligrams respectively, per one-ounce serving (roughly twelve chips).
- Contain added sugar. Sugar (in the form of dextrose) is here. But please. Get rid of all that added sugar.
Ingredients
Dried potatoes, vegetable oil (cottonseed, sunflower, and/or corn oil), unmodified potato starch, rice flour, and less than 2% of the following: sugar, salt, mono- and diglycerides, dextrose, skim milk, soy lecithin, onion powder, whey, monosodium glutamate, corn starch, sour cream (cultured cream, skim milk), lactose, maltodextrin (made from corn), natural and artificial flavor, malic acid, citric acid, cheddar cheese (milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes), corn syrup solids, buttermilk, artificial color (including yellow 5 lake, blue 1, red 40), disodium inosinate, and disodium guanylate.
Contains milk and soy ingredients.
Nutrition Facts
- Serving size: 1 ounce (12 crisps). Servings per container: About. 6.
- Calories per serving: 150. Calories from fat: 80.
- Total fat: 9 grams, 13% DV.
- Saturated fat: 2.5 grams, 13% DV.
- Trans fat: 0 grams.
- Polyunsaturated fat: 3.5 grams.
- Monounsaturated fat: 1.5 grams.
- Cholesterol: 0 milligrams, 0% DV.
- Sodium: 190 milligrams, 8% DV.
- Total carbohydrate: 17 grams, 5% DV.
- Dietary fiber: 1 gram, 4% DV.
- Sugars: 1 gram.
- Protein: 2 grams.
- Vitamin A: 0% DV.
- Calcium: 0% DV.
- Vitamin C: 2% DV.
- Iron: 0% DV.
Product Rating
I like these sour cream and onion potato chips. Though these are a much newer product than Pringles, Lay’s Stax fit well into most any party cuisine, hold their freshness for several hours when poured into a non-sealed bowl, and are widely recognized as a snack food regular. I’d rate this product at 90 out of 100.
Where To Buy Lay’s Stax Sour Cream & Onion Potato Chips
So look for them in the blue can with the green, black, and white label, with the bright yellow lid at your favorite larger grocery or convenience stores.
References
Revision History
- : Adjusted category and tag assignments, fixed typos, and added whitespace.
- 2012-05-22: Originally published.