Best Tortilla Chips and Potato Chips for Your Dip - Consumer Reports (2024)

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:

1. No added flavors beyond salt.
2. 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.
3. 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.