Share the love. Photograph: David Sillitoe
Bacon and egg, blue cheese, escargot, pigeon and garlic, tea and biscuits. What do they have in common? They're all potential flavours of crisps that could be coming to a corner shop near you if visitors to the Walkers Crisps website have their way. The snack food company is inviting us, the eaters, to suggest future flavours. Apparently, they're liking the idea of a Great British Breakfast flavour - and, I'll admit, so am I.
This isn't the first time a crisps manufacturer has opened up the production process. In June 2007, Doritos launched a flavour with a code-name. No mention of ingredients, taste or e-numbers, just a whacky video and the world's taste buds on call to buy, taste and describe the X-13D - as the code-named snack was originally called.
Walkers are playing a slightly safer game by asking us what we'd like to see in the bag before it's put in the bag. After pummelling my brains for snack-crack combinations, in the knowledge that some manufacturers don't give a monkey's, I'm down to a final list of four.
In reverse order; cheese and pickle - which I quickly discover already exists - who knew? - so much for my out-and-about, on-the-street research. Second up, sea urchin - fishy flavours are underrepresented in the world of crisps and urchin possesses a distinctive, bitey wallop. Then there's HP Sauce. If it's good enough for Worcester Sauce why not the brown?
Lastly, and the main contender is confit de canard. Call it fried duck, call it deep fried duck, call it crispy duck ... it's the kind of subtle flavour, of the fabulous roast chicken / roast beef stable, that is perfectly suited to foil wrapping. Not too avant garde to kill the taste buds, not too bland to bore them either.
In this new year what will the world bring us in the snack realm, and what flavours would you like to see grace the top, middle and bottom shelves of your local corner shop?
