A CHEESE CRISP WOULD NOT TASTE LIKE CHEESE UNLESS PAIRED WITH THE RIGHT SPICES

on German shelves, you have to understand immigration history. But I don’t hear her secrets until the end of my journey. First, I go to Leicester.

FOR more than 75 years, Leicester has been the place where British potatoes become crisps. Its Walkers factory produces 5 million packets a day, steam billowing from behind big blue security gates. Just down the road sits its HQ, where 300 marketers, scientists and chefs decide which crisps the world needs next.

Emma Wood controls most of the world outside the US – at least when it comes to the taste of crisps. In 2017 – 12 years after she started working for Walkers’ parent company, PepsiCo – she was promoted to director of global flavour and seasonings, meaning it’s her job to develop flavours for Africa, Europe and Asia. It’s not a responsibility she takes lightly.

“I know it’s not an expensive purchase,” she says over a conference table, “but it’s really disappointing when you buy something for your lunch and it’s not what you wanted it to be.”

People take their chips very seriously. Remember the outcry when Lay’s announced in 2020 it would no longer be selling its salt and vinegar crisps in South Africa, citing poor sales?

A year later it had a change of heart, and the flavour returned. Although fans were delighted, it’s still nowhere near as popular as plain salted Lay’s, which remains the company’s top seller locally followed by Caribbean onion and balsamic vinegar flavour.

In the past two decades, Emma’s work has taken her everywhere. Before Doritos launched in India five years ago, she took a “culinary trek” across the northern city of Lucknow, trying different pilaus, meats and breads from street food stalls.

She relies on knowledge from local PepsiCo teams, so that if she says, “I think I can taste cardamom,” they can clarify: “It’s roasted green cardamom, actually.”

Doritos launched in India with the same cheese and chilli flavours available in South Africa, but a few years later Masala Mayhem was released in the region. Why does it take as many as seven years to launch a crisp?

It starts – as everything does now – on computers. Global development director Tom Wade says PepsiCo uses a tool that “slurps up” every restaurant menu on the internet.

“You look at which ingredients are starting to feature; you can see the number of restaurants in Europe using smoked paprika, the incidence of black salt in restaurants in such and such a region,” he says.

Once the computers have done their job, the data makes its way to Emma. If she’s lucky, she can repurpose an existing flavour.

In 2010, Lay’s launched Patatje Joppie in the Netherlands because of the nation’s love of Joppiesaus, a curried mayonnaise. Emma says the same flavour exists as Honey Mustard in other parts of the world.

When a flavour is made from scratch, Emma goes to chef Pat Clifford, who spent 14 years in restaurants – including some with two Michelin stars – before moving into “ambient foods” (anything in the supermarket that isn’t chilled).

Pat’s “creative design kitchen” is clean and clinical. Bald, tall, bespectacled and wearing one smartwatch on each wrist, Pat has a matter-of-fact way of speaking that brings to mind a crushed peppercorn crisp.

The chef fries some pointed peppers to demonstrate how he developed a flavour that was released in Spain in 2022. Despite traditionally being less adventurous with crisps, Spanish appetites have changed recently thanks to younger generations being exposed to different crisps on their travels (and on the internet). So Pat collaborated with a TV chef to recreate some traditional dishes.

“I went to work with Quique Dacosta in his restaurant in Spain. He showed me how he made this dish,” he says. The peppers are fried in charcoal-infused oil to give them a smoky flavour. The sharpness of the pepper cuts through in the real dish and the roasted wood-fired pepper with olive oil and garlic crisps.”

But a tomato crisp wouldn’t taste like tomato and a cheese crisp wouldn’t taste like cheese unless paired with “the right blend of spices”. The company is evasive

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