We first came across Kelly’s products in Salzburg at Murphy’s Law Irish pub where I watched the first leg of the Liverpool-Benfica Champions League quarterfinal. At halftime, having consumed a Guinness already, and after a slightly underwhelming dinner, I decided it might be best to have a little food in addition to the beer I felt obliged to order for the second half. That’s when I noticed the packs of Kelly’s chips on the wall.
It being an Irish pub… where the bartender spoke only English… where they served Guinness and Smithwick’s and Killian’s… and the chips being called Kelly’s, I just assumed the chips were Irish. Wrong.
Kelly’s, as it turns out, is a Viennese manufacturer of snack products. The supermarkets here are lined with Kelly’s products. And even some of the products I thought weren’t Kelly’s turn out to have simply been manufactured by Kelly’s subsidiaries. Here is the full list of Kelly’s products, of which I’ve tried only a small fraction.
Austrian Goldfish: 3.0 stars
There are many snacks here that are the same. Pringles seem exceedingly popular – they even have their own knock-off Pringles brands here that you see side-by-side with the real thing. There is no shortage of potato chips, though, Pringles aside, these are mostly from Kelly’s. But there are also plenty of snack foods for which there’s simply some different product here that seems to be a facsimile of the one we’re used to. In this case, Soletti (a Kelly’s subsidiary) makes goldfish.
I’m obviously not going to be able to try all of these, but I thought I’d try some Austrian goldfish. The first notable difference here is the color. These look something more like a normal baked bread product rather than the American shade that is the universal signifier for fake cheese. The flavor followed the same direction as the color – notably less cheese-tasting than the American version. All in all, not bad, but not really good either. It honestly tased a bit more like a Club cracker with a bit of cheese flavoring than anything else.
Mexicanos: 2.5 stars
Another Kelly’s product line is a few sets of chips they call “nachos.” These are basically different varieties of tortilla chips, but with seasoning. Of the various American snack products, they’re closest to Doritos (which I’ve only seen occasionally here).
The first thing that stands out, obviously, is the name. I don’t really think the language matters too much. In any language, “I’d like of bag of Mexicans1 please,” sounds bad. The decorative sombreros and cacti don’t inspire confidence that the company has done even the remotest amount of critical thought about Mexican culture. (Some American companies have shifted to more pre-Colombian imagery like temples or the Mayan calendar in recent years.)
The particular style we selected is the “würzig & pikant,” which basically translates as “spicy and spicy.” On a scale from 1-10, with 1 being milk and 10 being ghost pepper, these were a 1. I don’t mean they had the faintest hint of a kick. I mean, they literally had no capsaicin at all. Disappointing flavor, culturally insensitive name – I’ll pass on these in the future.
Grilled Chicken Style Snack: 3.5 stars
The name is worrisome. I don’t know if “grilled chicken style snack” sounds more natural in German than in English, but I have absolutely no idea what “grilled chicken style snack” means. Is it supposed to taste like grilled chicken? Is it made with residue of grilled chicken? Is it barbecue? Or seasoned any number of different ways grilled chicken might be?
Despite the name, it turns out these actually were pretty good! There’s a nice crunch (though it fades a bit too quickly, in my estimation). The flavor is clearly barbecue. This does raise questions about what this has to do with chicken other than the shape of the snack being in the form of a drumstick. But all in all, I’d happily get these again (though I won’t because there are too many other snacks to try).
Furiosi – Cheese Style: 2.0 stars
Even the English(?) on the packaging of these snacks I found incomprehensible, so naturally, that made them an irresistible purchase.
What are Furiosi? The word seems like an Italian cognate. Are they furious? About what exactly? And what does “cheese-style” mean? Cheese is not a style, it’s a flavor, or a food in and of itself. Calling something cheese-style would be like calling something mean-textured or brick-spirited or blue-flavored, the latter of which brings to mind memories I’d rather forget.
The shape of these Furiosi is most akin to that of the regular (not puffs) Cheetos. They’re irregular and stick-like, but white-cheddar colored rather than fake-cheese orange. Unfortunately, the texture is not up to Cheeto standards. It’s more of a puffy texture than the enduring crunch offered by original Cheetos.
The flavor is unmistakably cheese-style, which, I’m sure, is how it got its name. It doesn’t taste like cheese, but it does taste like a scientist was sent to a lab and told to make something that tasted like cheese using only synthetic materials. I guess “produced with laboratory-manufactured ersatz cheese flavoring” probably isn’t the best marketing language.
I’m not sure Mexicans themselves have a lot of room for complaint here, though. They famously produce a beer called ‘Indio,’ or ‘Indian,’ in English. So, yeah, I’ve asked the waiter to “bring me an Indian, please,” in Mexico. Credit to my friend Steven for pointing out the ridiculousness of the syntactical result.
"the name is worrisome" sounds like a stellar sub-theme which might need to follow you further...
I know you didn't like the paprika flavor of the "cheetos" from last time, but you gotta give paprika potato chips a try. In my experience paprika chips are 11/10 tasty (and somewhat similar to bbq). And keep an eye out for country-specific Pringle flavors (Switzerland had Emmentaler Pringles, though I don't remember if they were good or not...)