Where's the marmite then? (Walkers Marmite Yeast Extract Flavour Crisps)

Member Name: hypno06

Product:	Walkers Marmite Yeast Extract Flavour Crisps
Date:	17/06/09 (96 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice enough

Disadvantages: But not enough taste of marmite

Love it or hate it - marmite is something we all have an opinion of. Personally, I love it, as does my daughter, but my son and husband dislike it intensely.

Twiglets.....there's another thing. Marmite flavoured wheaty sticks that sell by the bucketload towards Christmas. Now, as you would expect, I love them too, as does my daughter. Strangely though, my husband (despite being a marmite-hater) loves twiglets and we can't get a look in if there is a tub in the house because he has hogged the lot. My son, though, still does the "marmite, yuk" noises.....

So, we move on to Marmite crisps.....these have seemingly made a disappearance from our supermarket shelves for a while before coming back with a "bag makeover", and rebranded as "new". The bag is very different to the one above, now, with the Marmite logo making a bigger impact, and the colour of the bag being "Marmite brown" rather than yellow.

So, would we love them or hate them......well, of course that depends on their taste.

They certainly smell marmitey.....you get that very distinctive smell as soon as you open the packet.

They definitely look marmitey.......each crisp is coated in speckled brown stuff, just like flattened twiglets!

By this point, we are getting quite excited.....I was optimistic at this stage of the proceedings!

On to the taste, then......and this is where my disappointment kicks in. These crisps didn't taste of marmite. They didn't taste anything like marmite. Don't get me wrong, they were edible, but Marmite has such a distinctive flavour, it is really obvious when they don't have that taste!

My first thought was "Bovril", that competitor to Marmite......how strange that my Marmite crisps tasted of Bovril!

And I wasn't the only one - my son, who doesn't like twiglets or marmite, scoffed his crisps and said they tasted more like "beef and onion"......

They were nice enough - but not marmitey enough. If you had put these in a bowl on a table, we wouldn't have said they were anything other than beefy.

Having said that, they are approved by the vegetarian society, so there is certainly no beef or beef extract in these crisps. If you have a meat free diet, you can eat them with confidence.

Indeed, you can eat these on any diet - a bag contains 128 calories and less than a gramme of saturated fat. Not bad if you are watching your waistline.

The front of the packet claims "Good old potatoes, supercharged with a heady dose of lovely marmite"..........I beg to differ just a little.

Summary: Marmite crisps that taste like.......bovril?