It’s Film Festival Fall, which means Awards Season will be upon us before you know it. In my family, that’s the cue to start stocking up on potato chips. (Well, stock up even more than usual.) My Mama raised me in the art of eating “shovel food,” food you can easily shovel into your mouth without looking away from the TV while enjoying a 3+ hours-long award show. Obviously, potato chips are perfectly suited to this cuisine. So it’s timely that Pringles is now launching a new variety of chip that’s a real departure from their norm (that is it would be timely if I ate Pringles, more on that later). Meet Pringles Mingles: air-puffed chips that combine two flavors (hence the mingling), and, brace yourself, are bowtie-shaped and come in bags! They’re available now. If a Pringle doesn’t come in a can, is it still a Pringle?
Pringles’ latest snack is shaped and packaged differently than consumers might expect.
The beloved chip brand’s new Pringles Mingles are air-puffed and bagged. The permanent addition to the Pringles line is the first non-canned chip in more than 15 years, according to a press release.
Rather than the saddle-shaped (or hyperbolic paraboloid shape, to be more specific) Pringles fans know, Mingles look like bowties. The air-puffed snacks are meant to “melt in your mouth,” according to a press release, and be “crispy on the outside and light and airy on the inside.”
Pringles Mingles are doubling up on flavors, which is where the name “mingles” comes from. Each bag will blend two Pringles flavors in one puff. The three blended flavors are cheddar and sour cream, sharp white cheddar and ranch and dill pickle and ranch.
The snacks are available at grocery stores nationwide and will be permanent Pringles products.
Um, not to knock People Magazine, but there’s a fourth flavor combination: BBQ & Pizza. I don’t mean to be rude, it’s just that these kinds of random yet specific details, like only one of four products being omitted, keep me up at night. Why would BBQ & Pizza be left behind? Was a lobby contracted to kill that flavor profile? Is it because the bag is purple?! So many questions, so many possibilities… (Note by CB: on the Walmart site they have a graphic that says “try them all” and leaves out BBQ & Pizza! Maybe this is contributing to the confusion.)
Anyway, it’s clear that Pringles wants to get in on the puff chip game, and the physicality of puff doesn’t really lend itself to Pringles’ signature cylindrical cans. Ok. As I alluded to earlier, I don’t eat Pringles, so yes, my reporting is biased and the very fact that I undertook this assignment is a breach of ethics. But many of you have been waiting for this follow up ever since I hinted at my anti-Pringles beliefs when we talked about the best potato chip brands back in the summer. So to clarify, it’s not that Pringles did anything to me or my family. It’s just their very existence that offends me. A potato chip is a work of art; it begins with one of the most sublime gifts on this planet, the potato, and through skilled human craftsmanship becomes a delectable confection that embodies that dynamic balance between the quest for perfection with the beauty of imperfections. The potato is sliced with the goal of uniformity, but the true art is in celebrating the individual way each piece actually comes out. Like a snowflake, no two chips are alike. Unless you have f–king Pringles. They were literally developed so each chip would be exactly the same. But here’s the kicker — in 1975 the FDA decided Pringles weren’t even potato chips! All down to their process of using dehydrated potatoes that are put into a chip mold, instead of slicing and frying potatoes.
But because I’m an exceedingly reasonable and fair-minded person, I will acknowledge that these Mingles bowtie puffs do seem to take a welcome step towards freer forms, at least compared to the original Pringles chip shape. So there, I give them that. And also the new slogan suggestion that instead of “once you pop, you can’t stop,” Mingles can be “once you puff, you must stuff.”
photos credit: Pringles and O’Neil Gonzales on Pexels, Proper Quality Shandis on Unsplash
We had a cat who loved Pringles. My mom would buy Pringles just for the cat and we weren’t allowed to touch the cat’s Pringles.
😄 OMG!