How Much Potato Doth A True Crisp Contain?
LONDON — No profit grows, Shakespeare once wrote, where no pleasure is taken. And so in the tedious march of life, we find joy in small things: The rising of the sun. A fine glass of wine. The greasy snap of a potato crisp.
But soft! Not so fast. Life affords no simple pleasures, and even that delectable crunch comes with a weighty debate: How much potato doth a true crisp — or chip — contain?
This was recently immortalized by a British tax appeals court, which ruled that Walkers Sensations Poppadoms, the fluffy, non-crisp-appearing potato medallions, are, in fact, the same as potato crisps.
The ruling means that Walkers, which is owned by Pepsico, will have to pay the same value-added tax on its poppadoms as it does on its various crisps. More important, a trial judge has recorded the sort of dictate that is sure to disproportionately irritate the masses.
“Food is probably one of the most visceral, powerful ways of expressing
A food-or-snack debate with millions of dollars in tax revenue at stake.
cultural identity,” said Ty Matejowsky, a professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida. As such, he said, the court ruling was unlikely to change anyone’s crisp-related opinion.
A poppadom is a flat, crunchy, circular wafer typically made with gram flour. Traditionally, they are about the size of a tortilla. Walkers, though, made them smaller, closer to the size of a potato chip. They introduced their poppadoms in the late 1980s.
The debate is about whether poppadoms are food or snack. For the law’s purposes, “food” requires preparation and is intended to be eaten as part of something bigger. “Snacks” are efficient packages that can be enjoyed on their own. Like, say, a bag of potato chips.
In Britain, most food items are tax-exempt, but the current Value Added Tax rate for snacks like crisps is 20 percent. That puts the potential stakes of Walkers’ poppadom play in the multimillions.
Walkers has claimed since 2021
that its poppadoms are not the same as potato crisps, and hence should be tax-exempt like most other foods.
There are plenty of reasons, Walkers’ lawyers said, that a poppadom is not a crisp: They are meant to be eaten with other things like chutney or dips — or, one might say, prepared. And, any “ordinary person on the street” would know they were not the same thing. Perhaps most critically, Walkers argued, the sorts of potato starch and granules used to make the poppadom should not count as potato ingredients.
But the judge said that though the poppadoms may not contain as much potato as a traditional crisp, the proper ratio of potato-to-poppadom-to-chip is in the eye of the beholder.
“The products,” the judge wrote, “obviously contain potato.”
Walkers’ lawyers argued that plenty of nonpotato poppadoms were exempt from the Value Added Tax.
But the judge was not swayed: “The fact that a poppadom made to a traditional recipe from gram flour without potato is zero-rated for VAT purposes does not mean that a poppadom made to a traditional recipe which includes potato must also be zero-rated.”
Walkers, which did not respond to a request for comment, has until mid-March to appeal. Until then, the law has spoken. Spiritually, it might be a poppadom. But legally — at least for now — it is a chip.