Remember the summertime barbecues of childhood? Sunshine, sprinklers, the slurred speech of day-drunk parents? When, as kids, we’d eat potato chips and, alternately, drink lemonade? Delicious, but so inefficient. With a chip in one hand and a lemonade in the other, how did we even eat a hot dog, wave a little American flag, or blow a few fingers off in an unfortunate fireworks accident?
Enter the Utz Lemonade Potato Chip. It’s a summertime limited edition that’s banking on our nostalgia for summers past and the universal desire to save time by combining salty, crunchy snacks with sweet, sour liquids.
Jeff and I (Talia) are coworkers, so, like consolidating every flavor category into one chip, snacking together in the breakroom is a feat of efficiency: We socialize and avoid starvation while earning wages. Triple play!
I like these Utz Lemonade Potato Chips—they’re tangy, like salt and vinegar chips, but also somehow sunny, like the sun—so over lunch with a few colleagues, I lure Jeff into my sweet lemon chip cult.
JEFF: When Talia offers me a lemonade potato chip, I say no. Lemonade chips? Not how I was raised. Also: gross. Also, I don’t appreciate the ostentation of the bright, cursive Lemonade overriding the dull-yellow Utz bag of my youth.
TALIA: I insist he try just one.
JEFF: I concede. The first contact with the mouth is jarring. Yes, it crunches like a potato chip, and the briny aftertaste stings the palate as it should. But the jolt of chemically induced sweetness is unfamiliar and frankly uncalled for. I frown and roll the bag closed like a scroll. I cinch it shut with the office chip-clip, the good one, and push it to the middle of the table. “No,” I say. “Those are not good.”
TALIA: Still committed to efficiency, I don’t waste any breath disagreeing. Time favors the lemonade potato chip. Minutes after swearing off them, Jeff slides the bag toward him, hoping nobody notices. I notice.
JEFF: My hand in the bag, I’m seized by an existential crisis: Who am I? Sugar on potato chips? What would my parents say?… And yet, what else is there? Life? Work? The soulless turkey and cheese that I packed? Conversation with Talia? I go in for a couple more.
TALIA: Soon, he’s ten chips in. Twenty. The mouth-burning sugary-salty menace has shaken his staid existence. He tears through forty more, going three and four at a time, losing all sense of calories, professionalism, and self. He has chip shards on his shirt. Finally, he cinches the bag closed. He re-applies the chip clip, but the bag looks completely kicked.
JEFF: I know there are crumbs in there.
TALIA: He’s still eyeing the bag. We’re surrounded by coworkers who have already declared the chips “pretty good,” so at first, maybe he was just trying to be an agreeable team player. But now I suspect he’s scanning the table for competitors.
JEFF: He who hesitates is lost, I think. I uncinch. I go in. These colleagues used to see me as a kind, mild-mannered presence in the office, but surely now they realize I’ve been a low-key daredevil all this time. I imagine I’m the star of a rollicking culinary action-adventure. I’m the James Bond of hybrid snacks, and I live for the sweetness. It’s all I want anymore in potato chips—and life.
TALIA: He’s paused again. All that’s left is the ultimate efficiency, the final indignity: snapping one edge of the bag taut and pouring the remaining rubble down his throat. Will he do it?
JEFF: I want that electric saline citric dust.
According to Utz, the Lemonade Potato Chip is a proud partner of Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation for Childhood Cancer. So, beyond just combining salty with sweet and solid with liquid, the lemonade potato chip has catapulted us to even greater heights of efficiency: eating, earning, encountering our true wild natures, cementing our friendship, and saving kids’ lives.
Thus end our days of snacking on ordinary, unlimited editions: Sour Cream & Onion, Cheddar & Sour Cream, BBQ. And “Plain” or “Ruffled”? Please. Sure, we could sit there, bored, cautious, inefficient, a pitcher of lemonade and a big bag of plainsies between us, and try to recreate the effect.
But that’s the old Talia and Jeff. Today, we merge chip and lemonade. We save children. And we save time.