23-05-2025
Tartiflette and pastis: The French crisp brand making taste all its own
You'll see Brets crisps taking up a fair chunk of the space on the crisp/potato chips aisle of your local supermarket.
And while they do the standard salted, salt and vinegar and roast chicken flavours, they're also not afraid to try something a little different.
And that has made them a hit with under-35s in France (and Quebec, where they are also sold) spawning viral tasting videos on social media.
We're not just talking basic variations on the theme of traditional flavours here, either – though their cheddar and Roscoff onions is a worthy cheese and onion upgrade. They have done some properly off-the-wall taste sensations. Or otherwise.
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There's wood-fired pizza flavour, yakitori – based on the Japanese skewered chicken; 'petit onions'; a spicy pili pili (a variant spelling of piri piri); jalapeno cheddar – aka cheese and onion for crisp fans with a sense of adventure; cheddar and beer; Carbonara; sundried tomato and balsamic vinegar; pesto-mozarella; falafel; kebab; grilled peppers and chorizo; curry sauce; chili and mint, for that indescribable hot-cold mouth sensation; fruity curry; mustard pickles; honey mustard; and sweet-and-salty flavours.
They even do crisps that have a Nutri-Score B rating for healthy people who don't like 'goût'.
This has been a marketing masterstroke. Brets is now the second most popular crisp brand in France, with an 18 percent market share.
But what about the particularly French flavours?
Pastis:
yes, there's a pastis flavour Brets, invoking the popular French drink of the same name. The drink tastes of aniseed and licorice, and we're not at all sure about the necessary addition of potato slices to that particular – and acquired – taste.
Bleu d'Auvergne:
not the only Made-in-France cheese flavour that Brets do – there's also a Jura cheese one, a camembert one, a bleu pancetta that mixes the mellow-sharp tang of the Auvergne cheese with the salty Italian charcuterie, and a goat's cheese with espelette peppers.
Aligot à l'Aveyronnaise:
Aligot is an infinitely superior form of cheesy mash – made by mixing mashed potato with butter, garlic, cream and Laguiole cheese. It's unlikely the crisps are quite as stretchy as the mash after which they're flavoured.
Aioli:
creamy garlic and olive oil sauce
Ceps:
Yep. Mushroom flavour. On a thin, deep-fried and cooled slice of potato.
Chips de Sarrasin à la Forestière:
Buckwheat crisps. With mushrooms. Oh, and herbs. They also do a Guerande salt buckwheat crisp. And a curry cream one, too. To be fair, sarrasin is a very Breton ingredient. But curry isn't.
Tartiflette:
The hearty winter apres-ski coronary in a meal of potatoes, lardons, onions and reblochon cheese in crisp form.
Ail confit et herbes de Provence:
A sort of gastro-flavour of garlic cooked slowly in oil or fat with the classic combination of Provencal herbs
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Carbonade Flamande:
Admittedly, the traditional beef-in-beer classic is a Belgian original – but it's a popular dish in northern France, too, so we're claiming it, just as Brets have to make a crisp flavour.
No wonder the online taste tests are so popular. Lists and rankings are astonishingly successful online practice these days. And it's easy to imagine some of these flavours – looking at you, pastis – are created solely to create a social media buzz.
It hasn't always been completely successful. One online poll of possible future flavours included an option for 'petrol'. To the surprise of precisely no one, that one never made it into production – its inclusion in the poll was later attributed to an error by 'an intern'.
