Review: Green Giant Garden Ranch Roasted Veggie Tortilla Chips

I mentioned in a previous Green Giant chip veggie chip review that it just seemed to me that Green Giant (General Mills) was directly taking a shot at Doritos under the auspice of being a "healthy" chip.  When I saw these new Green Giant Garden Ranch Roasted Veggie Tortilla Chips in the store, I once again had the same thought.  If you take a second to think about it, these are basically a direct shot at the Cool Ranch flavor of Doritos.  That's fine as chip companies compete on flavors all the time, but I just find it funny that these are "healthy" while Doritos are junk.  In reality, the are all junk.  Anyway, I got this bag on sale for $2.49 at Kroger and it is 5.0 ounces and contains five servings of about ten chips each.  Each of those ten chip servings are 130 calories as well.

These chips are based on both roasted and toasted flavors (like that rhyme?).  The chips themselves are a toasted corn based (see the toaster lines on the chips?) while the veggies that make up the garden component are roasted.  Clear as mud?  Good.  Anyway, those roasted veggies include garlic, green and red peppers, tomatoes and onions.  Those are all present in powder form and as you can see on the chips by the various reds and greens that are visible.  The white coloring on the chips, which is also a bit slimy to the touch, is buttermilk powder, thus giving the dairy portion ranch component to the chip.  In terms of smell, these were quite potent and had strong scents of garlic and onion, so yep, they smelled like Cool Ranch Doritos.

Unsurprisingly, these tasted quite a bit like Cool Ranch Doritos but were not an exact match.  First, the toasted and roasted components showed themselves a bit more prominently when you are comparing to the Doritos variety.  Also, these were a bit more "creamy" from the powdered buttermilk than the Doritios variety as well.  I already mentioned the roasted quality, but I'll touch on it again because that roasted pepper quality gave these a bit more spice and more of a vibrant type of taste than the sometimes flat Cool Ranch chips.  They had a bit more of a corn taste too as opposed to the corn paste taste that Doritos are based on, so that was nice as well.

Buy It or Fly By It?  In the end, it really comes down to whether you want your junk foods to have more of a healthy taste as opposed to a truly manufactured taste and in the instance of the veggie tortilla chips, that is the case.  Whether that taste is truly authentic veggies or not, it was enough to trick me into thinking it was, so I give this a BUY IT rating.  These typically are more expensive per ounce than the junk Doritos, but I guess if you want that veggie taste, you have to pay a bit of a premium.

BUY IT!!