The right chip depends on what dip you’re serving. Whether that’s salsa, guacamole, spinach artichoke, or seven-layer dip, the consistency and type of dip will call for a chip with a complementary flavor and structure that can withstand dipping.
We bought nearly two dozen bags of tortilla chips and potato chips and conducted a taste test to see which bag is worthy of being a salty companion to your favorite dip. There were just three criteria in mind when selecting the chips:
- No added flavors beyond salt.
- Widely distributed brands—sorry, your favorite regional chip might not be here—and we skipped on store-brand chips, such as 365 By Whole Foods Market, Kirkland Signature, and Trader Joe’s.
- Standard tortilla or potato. No multigrain, grain-free, popped, reduced-fat, or reduced-sodium chips. And dear God, no baked fakery.
The Tortilla Chips and Potato Chips We Evaluated
- Brad’s Organic White Corn Tortilla Chips
- Cape Cod Kettle Cooked Potato Chips, Original
- Cape Cod Waves Sea Salt Kettle Cooked Potato Chips
- Deep River Snacks Original Sea Salt Kettle Cooked Potato Chips
- Garden of Eatin’ Yellow Corn Tortilla Chips
- Green Mountain Gringo Yellow Corn Tortilla Strips
- Kettle Brand Potato Chips, Sea Salt
- Late July Snacks Organic Restaurant Style Tortilla Chips, Sea Salt
- Lay’s Classic Potato Chips
- Lay’s Kettle Cooked Original Potato Chips
- Lay’s Wavy Original Potato Chips
- Ruffles Original Potato Chips
- Simply Tostitos Organic Blue Corn Tortilla Chips
- Tostitos Bite Size Tortilla Chips
- Tostitos Original Restaurant Style Tortilla Chips
- Tostitos Scoops Tortilla Chips
- Utz Original Potato Chips
- Utz Kettle Classics Original Potato Chips
- Utz Ripples Original Potato Chips
- Utz Wavy Original Potato Chips
- Xochitl Mexican Style Salted Corn Chips
How We Evaluated the Tortilla Chips and Potato Chips
We tasted each of the chips on their own and then got dipping. The dips ranged from runny to thick, including thin salsa verde, semi-chunky salsa fresca, chunky mango salsa, queso, sour cream-onion dip, guacamole, black bean dip, spinach artichoke dip, buffalo chicken dip, and seven-layer dip.
We assessed each chip for the following factors:
- Flavor: Does it taste like potato or corn? Are there any weird aftertastes, staleness, or off-flavors?
- Saltiness: Is there enough salt to taste good on its own? Is it too salty with dip?
- Crunchiness: Is it too greasy or too hard?
- Dip-ability: Does it have a sturdy structure and a shape and size that makes sense for dipping?
- Appearance: Are the chips uniform in color? Do they look appealing and intact?
We realized immediately that classic potato chips were not up to the task. Don’t get me wrong, I can eat Lay’s Classic Potato Chips all day, any day, on their own (the Utz were right up there, too), but they’re too fragile for dipping even the moderate dips and too salty and oily for the salsa and queso. The kettle potato chips and ridged potato chips performed better to varying degrees.
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A couple of the tortilla chips—Tostitos Original Restaurant Style Tortilla Chips and Simply Tostitos Organic Blue Corn Tortilla Chips—were also eliminated early on due to their large size. If you’re snacking in a shared environment, you don’t want to double dip or break up the chips with your hands. You also don’t want too scant of an amount of dip on your palm-size chip.
As Heather Gardea, vice president of research and culinary development at the Mexican-American restaurant chain El Pollo Loco, puts it, “Chips should be thick and cut from full-size tortillas to stand up against heavier dips and deliver the perfect bite every time.” She says that at El Pollo Loco, they cut thick 7-inch tortillas into six chips and use extra cornmeal and less fat for a heartier, crunchier chip.
“We want the right thickness so that it can scoop our hand-smashed guacamole without breaking, but light enough to almost feel crispy, similar to a potato chip,” says Katy Velazquez, executive chef at Qdoba Mexican Eats, a Mexican-style fast-casual restaurant chain. “We seek the right amount of moisture so that the chips crisp up nicely without becoming soggy and ideally create those occasional light air bubbles.”
But can these tortilla chip ideals be found in a bagged grocery product? We found a handful of tortilla chips and potato chips that fit the bill. Here are our favorite chip and dip pairings.
Best Chips for Your Dip at a Glance
Best for Smooth, Runny Salsa
Xochitl Mexican Style Salted Corn Chips
These thin chips have a good amount of salt and shatter upon entering your mouth, which is ideal when coated with a tasty salsa.
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Prices from: $4.39
Best for Queso
Garden of Eatin' Yellow Corn Tortilla Chips
These thick, coarse chips have a golden-yellow color and rustic texture that offsets the buttery mouthfeel of queso.
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Best for Sour Cream-Onion Dip
Utz Wavy Original Potato Chips
The large ridges give the chips structural reinforcement for dipping, but what we love most is how they provide a fluffy mouthfeel when eaten with this dip.
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Prices from: $5.22
Best for Guacamole and Bean Dip
Tostitos Bite Size Tortilla Chips
These baby tortilla chips are perfect for scooping up medium-thick dips. The smaller size offers more dipping leverage.
Read more
Prices from: $3.98
Best for Chunky Salsa
Tostitos Scoops Tortilla Chips
It seems as though these were invented specifically for chunky salsas, and they do their job very well, giving you a little salsa liquid with each bite, too.
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Prices from: $3.98
Best for Cheesy-Meaty-Creamy Dip
Deep River Snacks Original Sea Salt Kettle Cooked Potato Chips
These kettle chips taste fresh and like real potatoes. The thick, sturdy chips stand up to notoriously difficult dips.
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Prices from: $3.80
Best for Seven-Layer Dip
Green Mountain Gringo Yellow Corn Tortilla Strips
These long and skinny tortilla strips gracefully slip into the deep, dense dip, cutting through all the layers, and pluck out all those layers in one big dip-filled bite.
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Prices from: $4.35
Best for Smooth, Runny Salsa
Photo: Perry Santanachote/Consumer Reports
Xochitl tortilla chips are thin and shatteringly crisp.
Xochitl Mexican Style Salted Corn Chips
Prices from: $4.39
Product details
Size: 16 ounces
The tagline for these chips is “Xo Thin. Xo Crisp. Xo Good.” We tend to agree, especially those of us who don’t want to work too hard at chewing our chips. Lime is an ingredient here, but they’re not lime-flavored, and we don’t taste it. The Xochitl chips have a good amount of salt and shatter upon entering your mouth. When there’s a thin coating of salsa on said chip, it’s like a literal flavor explosion. In other words, this chip’s da bomb.
However, because the Xochitl is the thinnest tortilla chip of the bunch, it doesn’t hold up to thicker dips very well. Flavor-wise, we love it with the bean dip and guac, but it cracks under pressure.
If your household eats a lot of chips and salsa or you’re throwing a party, you might like to know that Xochitl tortilla chips are the best-value chips we got, at $6.29 per pound ($1.43 to $5.33 less than other tortilla chips), but we haven’t seen this brand come in bags any smaller than 12 ounces.
Best for Queso
Photo: Perry Santanachote/Consumer Reports
Garden of Eatin' tortilla chips are coarse and packed with corn flavor.
Garden of Eatin' Yellow Corn Tortilla Chips
Prices from: $5.12
Product details
Size: 10 ounces
These thick, coarse chips have a nice, rustic texture and beautiful golden yellow color. They provide substance and bite to offset the buttery mouthfeel of queso. The corn flavor doesn’t get lost in the queso’s punch but instead rounds it out nicely. The chips are suitable for nearly all the other dips, it just works especially well with the queso, which was surprisingly difficult to find a match for. It’s also worth noting that this is one of the most expensive tortilla chips we tasted.
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Christopher Simons, PhD, associate professor of sensory science at The Ohio State University, helps explain why this pairing works: All the tortilla chips we tasted have the same matrix—as in, they’re all chips—but flavors can be released differently depending on the type of corn and texture. “With the more coarse types, you may be able to feel that texture through a thick queso that you may not with a thinner chip or a less rustic style chip,” he says.
Best for Sour Cream-Onion Dip
Photo: Perry Santanachote/Consumer Reports
Utz's wavy potato chips are better for dipping than their rippled ones.
Utz Wavy Original Potato Chips
Prices from: $5.22
Product details
Size: 7.75 ounces
There are no standard definitions for ridges, ripples, and waves in the world of potato chips, but we gathered in our assessment that waves have larger curves, ridges/ripples are finer, and Ruffles is a name brand. Whatever you want to call them, these types of potato chips are suitable for dipping, says David Douches, PhD, a professor and potato breeder at Michigan State University. “I’m not a big dip guy, but if I’m going dipping, I’m going for the ridges.”
“Chips with ridges are essentially reinforced flat chips,” says Jim Nanni, a director of testing at CR. “They will be slightly stronger than a flat chip to resist a bending force applied perpendicular to their surface.” But make sure those ridges are pointed up and down when dipping, not parallel to the dip’s surface.
We found the rippled chips pleasant to eat on their own but a bit wimpy against the dips. The waves were better. Our sour cream-onion dip was the only dip where a tortilla chip was out of place. And kettle chips were too muscly for this delicate dip. Wavy chips were just right. The grooves give the dip a little traction to cling to, but the most remarkable part is how the Utz chips, in particular, provide a fluffy mouthfeel when eaten with the dip. It’s the comfort food equivalent of snuggling up under a large down blanket.
Best for Guacamole and Bean Dip
Photo: Perry Santanachote/Consumer Reports
Tostitos' bite-size tortilla rounds are the ideal shape and size for a medium-density dip.
Tostitos Bite Size Tortilla Chips
Prices from: $3.98
Product details
Size: 12 ounces
These baby tortilla chips are perfect for scooping up medium-thick dips. They’re well-salted and allow for the perfect ratio of dip to chip without needing to bite a chip and get crumbs all over your lap. The smaller size means more dipping leverage, too. “A small radius, whether that’s looking at a piece of steel or a tortilla chip, is much more rigid compared with something that has a much larger radius,” says Simons.
“When you’re dipping with bite-size circular chips, you’re also able to reinforce it more with your hands than if it was an irregular shape or a larger shape,” adds Ashley Soldavini, program manager at The Ohio State University’s Sensory Evaluation Center.
Best for Chunky Salsa
Photo: Perry Santanachote/Consumer Reports
The bowl-shaped chip from Tostitos was made for chunky salsas.
Tostitos Scoops Tortilla Chips
Prices from: $3.98
Product details
Size: 10 ounces
Most tortilla chips risk making a mess of chunky salsas. Those slippery bits always manage to roll off your chip’s smooth surface. It seems as though Tostitos Scoops were invented specifically for chunky salsas, and they do their job very well, giving you a little salsa liquid with each bite, too. “The cups are much more rigid, and the structural integrity is stronger than flatter chips just because of the shape, says Simons.” The only downside is they’re too delicate to scoop our thicker dips.
Best for Cheesy-Meaty-Creamy Dip
Photo: Perry Santanachote/Consumer Reports
A potato chip that actually tastes like a potato. Imagine that!
Deep River Snacks Original Sea Salt Kettle Cooked Potato Chips
Prices from: $3.80
Product details
Size: 5 ounces
These kettle chips (which were one of the priciest chips we bought) taste worlds apart from the other potato chips we tried, in that they taste fresh and like real potatoes. Douches says it could be the regional potato the company uses, or it could be their oil mix. “Some oils impart more flavor than others,” he says. “Sunflower oil is one that has a very mild flavor and brings out more of the potato flavor.” However, many of the potato chips we tasted also list sunflower oil in the ingredients.
Chips that are kettle-cooked—fried at a lower temperature for a longer period to achieve a highly crunchy chip—tend to be thicker and sturdier than classic potato chips, Douches says, making them more suitable for scooping heavy dips. We think they are especially ideal for dips with flavorings more suitable for a potato chip than a corn chip, such as spinach-artichoke dip and buffalo chicken dip.
Choosing a kettle chip for a hearty dip might also make it more satisfying to eat. Soldavini says kettle chips make it more satisfying to eat based on the sound they make when you bite into them, making them seem more crunchy than thin tortilla chips or ridged potato chips, which give off a higher pitch that’s more on the crispy end. “There’s something about that kettle crunch that people seem to really like,” she says.
Best for Seven-Layer Dip
Photo: Perry Santanachote/Consumer Reports
Green Mountain Gringo’s long and skinny strips were able to handle the big daddy of all dips, the seven-layer dip.
Green Mountain Gringo Yellow Corn Tortilla Strips
Prices from: $4.35
Product details
Size: 8 ounces
These chips aren’t our favorite on their own—they taste like frying oil—but work well with dips, especially the thick and heavy ones. The seven-layer dip is a formidable contender for any chip. Some of the other thicker tortilla chips managed clumsily, but Green Mountain Gringo’s long and skinny strips gracefully slip into the dip, cutting through all the layers, and are long enough to pluck out all those layers in one big dip-filled bite.
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Perry Santanachote
As a multimedia content creator at Consumer Reports, Perry Santanachote covered a range of trends—from parasite cleanses to pickleball paddles. Perry was also a main producer of our Outside the Labs content, evaluating products in her tiny Manhattan apartment.