We Tried Aldi's Turkey Stuffing And Garlic Mashed Potato Chips. Some Flavors Just Aren't Meant For Chips

When you buy an odd-flavored potato chip like Aldi's Turkey Stuffing and Garlic Mashed Potato Chips, you're not usually going into the experience thinking that you're going to find the best chips of your life. There's always a chance that you will, but it's really more of a novelty experience purchase. For less than $3 each, you're not out too much money if you hate either one of these chips. You can always pawn them off to your co-workers or just trash them if you don't like them.

There aren't a lot of food companies out there capitalizing on Thanksgiving flavors beyond the whole pumpkin spice craze. There was the Brach's Turkey Dinner Candy Corn insanity that most of us would like to forget. Not many others come to mind. Luckily, Aldi's decided to play on Thanksgiving flavors with two chip varieties that aren't meant to be a publicity stunt as much as chips you might actually enjoy. Aldi's Garlic Mashed Chips combine the tastes of garlic and Parmesan, which you'd hope would taste as good as garlic Parmesan fries. And if you like the tastes of sage, celery, garlic, and onions with bread crumbs in stuffing, it's likely the flavors would carry across just fine in Turkey Stuffing Potato Chips.

Aldi's Turkey Stuffing Wavy Potato Chips and Garlic Mashed Wavy Potato Chips are supposed to taste like Thanksgiving. Clancy's starts out making both chips with potatoes and vegetable oil before diverging with ingredients that are supposed to remind us of Thanksgiving dinner.

The Turkey Stuffing chips have a spiced flavor coating that includes garlic powder, yeast extract, hydrolyzed corn protein (for umami flavor), onion powder, sugar, salt, turmeric, spices, and natural flavor. Considering the Thanksgiving stuffing flavor profile, we're guessing that sage and celery are among the mystery flavors in the ingredient list. Citric acid serves as a preservative (via Healthline). These chips contain another preservative called corn maltodextrin, which several studies indicate may have an effect on the digestive microbiome (via Healthline).

The Garlic Mashed Potato Chips rely largely on Parmesan cheese and garlic for their flavoring. Salt and garlic powder provide the overwhelming flavor notes for the chips, but they also contain corn or cottonseed, whey powder, yeast extract, Parmesan, and spices. Citric acid and lactic acid serve as a preservative (via WebMD).

In a world where the price of everything continues to go up by dollars rather than cents, you'll be happy to learn that you can buy a 9.5-ounce bag of Aldi's Turkey Stuffing Chips or Aldi's Garlic Mashed Chips for just $1.99 each. That's not a bad price to pay for a seasonal flavor experience, whether or not you end up liking them. And $1.99 is the same price you'll pay for any of the other Clancy's-brand potato chips at Aldi.

With the serving size for the chips being an ounce, the price works out to about $0.21 per serving. So the chips are about the same price you'd pay for a store-brand wavy potato chip like Walmart's Great Value Cheddar and Sour Cream Potato Chips. However, it's about half the price you would pay for a flavored wavy potato chip from a leading brand. For comparison, Lay's Wavy Ranch Potato Chips from Walmart cost about $0.46 per serving.

Aldi released Clancy's Turkey Stuffing Potato Chips and Clancy's Garlic Mashed Potato Chips on November 9, 2022, during its regular Wednesday-morning ALDI Finds product drop. There are always a few people waiting for the doors to open on Wednesday mornings so that they can make a beeline for that one special product they found in the preview flyer or Upcoming Aldi Finds online preview. Nobody seemed to be beating down the doors Wednesday morning for Thanksgiving-themed chips, so you may find them at your local Aldi's for a little while during the Thanksgiving shopping season. The main thing to keep in mind with store stock for Aldi's Finds is that Aldi only orders a limited supply.

According to Potato Pro, Clancy's brand of chips is a private label for Aldi's chips. So don't expect to find Clancy's Thanksgiving-themed chips at another grocery or convenience store. You can find Aldi's stores (and their chips) in 39 states across the U.S.

If you're looking for these Thanksgiving potato chips, you'll want to bypass the potato chip aisle. Instead, head to one of the aisles that contains seasonal food products that are only on the shelves for a fleeting moment.

You never know what flavors of Clancy's potato chips to expect on the shelf when you walk in the door at Aldi's. Taquitos.net lists dozens of Clancy's potato chip flavors they've encountered. But not all of Clancy's potato chip flavors are equally appealing, and they're often among Aldi products with horrible reviews. The Pissed Consumer rating for Clancy's Chips is 2.7 out of 5.0 stars. Consumers often complain of chips being burnt-tasting, overly salty, or having a flavor that completely misses the mark.

The Turkey Stuffing Potato Chips aren't too salty and taste as you'd expect. However, like several previous Clancy's flavors, the Garlic Mashed Wavy Potato Chips are overly salty and miss the mark on flavor. Salt shows up three times in the ingredient list for the Garlic Mashed Chips, so it's not surprising they have 230 milligrams of sodium per serving (which the label says is 10% of the recommended daily salt intake). To compare, Clancy's Original Potato Chips have only 160 milligrams of sodium, and the Turkey Stuffing Wavy Potato chips have 200 milligrams of sodium. On the plus side, since the Garlic Mashed Potato Chips contain Parmesan cheese and whey powder, they provide 2% of the daily recommended amount of calcium. In comparison, both the original potato chip and the Turkey and Stuffing flavor provide at least half as much calcium.

Clancy's Garlic Mashed and Turkey Stuffing Potato Chips are nutritionally what you'd expect from potato chips. A one-ounce serving (about 12 chips) is 150 calories. Both flavors contain 16 grams of carbs, 1 gram of fiber, 1 gram of protein, and 1 gram of sugar. A serving also contains 9 grams of fat, but that's only 13% of your daily allowance, so it's not too bad. You'll also be happy to learn that neither contains cholesterol or trans fats.

As with most potato chips, the sodium content is a little high. You'll spend 10% of your daily sodium allowance (230 milligrams) on a serving of Garlic Mashed Potato Chips or 9% of your daily allowance (200 milligrams) for the Turkey Stuffing Chips.

Potatoes are a potassium-rich food, which is one thing that potato chips have going for them nutritionally. The Garlic Mashed Potato Chips have 8% of the potassium you should have for the day (340 milligrams), while the Turkey Stuffing Chips have 6% of the potassium you need (310 milligrams). The iron content is negligible, but at least the Parmesan in the Garlic Mashed Potato Chips brings the calcium content up from 0% of the daily recommended amount to 2% of the daily recommended amount (20 milligrams).

We expected the Garlic Mashed Potato Chip flavor to be the least objectionable flavor among Aldi's two Thanksgiving chips. After all, how could anyone go wrong with garlic and potatoes? Somehow, Clancy's has managed to ruin this flavor combo. If you can imagine what it would taste like to pour garlic salt directly on your tongue, you can come close to imagining the flavor of these chips. The Parmesan makes the garlic flavor even more pungent, and there seems to be a background of smoky bacon flavor as well. Vampires will run from these chips, but garlic fans are likely to cry foul, too. They're just as all-permeating as sour cream and onion chips and require a palate cleanser or full tooth brushing afterward. Try them at your own risk, but don't say we didn't warn you. Even if you don't end up finding them as vile as we did, we can't imagine you'd want to eat a full serving of them. Honestly, ours are destined for the trash if we can't find an unwitting victim upon which to foist them.

Luckily, the Turkey Stuffing Chips are a decent Aldi's Thanksgiving find. You're probably not going to want to buy multiple bags and you're not likely to sit down and accidentally eat a whole bag of them, but they're pleasant enough. If you've ever tasted the seasoning in StoveTop stuffing before cooking it, then you've got an idea of what these chips taste like. They're not quite StoveTop, but the flavor is definitely in the neighborhood. Although they're called Turkey Stuffing Chips, we didn't notice any turkey flavor –- just the flavor of the type of stuffing you eat with turkey on Thanksgiving. You can detect the sage, celery, garlic, and onions in perfect balance. The flavor combination is interesting on potatoes instead of bread crumbs, and it works okay for a Thanksgiving novelty chip. Of course, if you're not a stuffing fan, you're not going to care for these. But if you've ever been known to sit down with a bowl of nothing but stuffing for lunch, you probably wouldn't mind sitting down with a small bowl of Aldi's Turkey Stuffing Chips.