US vs India Lay’s | Food Wars | Insider Food

Nikhil: From calorie down to portion sizes, we wanted to find out all the differences between Lay's chips in the US and in India. This is "Food Wars." Here are all the Lay's chips you'll find in India that you won't find in the US. And here are all the Lay's chips in the US you can't find in India. Oh, my good God. Yeah! To begin things, I'm going to go with the one I hate the most, Spanish tomato tango. Yeah, I just never really liked this flavor. It's just too heavy on the tomato side. No. Oh,

man, that aftertaste is horrible. I have nothing nice to say about this flavor. Also, just to note, our standard Lay's chips come in the ridge style. We do also sell the flat style, but that's more of a special variety of Lay's. Next, it's West Indies hot and sweet chili, formerly Caribbean hot and sweet chili. That's what I'm talking about. Get out of here! And now for the maharaja of Indian Lay's, magic masala. If you haven't heard of this, you must be living under a rock, because this is the

little emperor of chips. Commonly known as blue Lay's. Look at this chip, dude! Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It's already so spicy. The reason this chip has become so popular in India is because they have actually managed to capture the masala of India so well. And masala, if you're wondering, is, like, ground-up spices that are added to every single dish we eat here. This is truly magic. I want to know what they're like. Joe got himself something. Oh, man. And the chip bags in India are, like, much

harder to open. Oh, man! You guys got them locked up tight. Got a rip! OK. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Damn, these are good! Not too spicy. Great flavor. We have so many flavors. I couldn't get them all for this shoot. I mean, I'll just start right here. Barbecue. This is the classic chip. I think this is more popular than the classic, to be honest. The US has, I would say, at least 10 different variations of barbecue, possibly more. So to have just, like, standard barbecue is pretty bold move by Lay's. Sa

lt and vinegar. [dreamy harp tune] Love salt and vinegar so much. I love it so much. Top chip. Top chip right here. Love salt and vinegar. Cheddar and sour cream. Ha ha ha, limón. Another favorite. Oh, man. It seems like lime-flavored chips would be weird, or citrusy chips, but ... so good. And these are, like, really limey. All the superfans watching know I do not like pickles. No. Let's kick it up a notch. Flamin' Hot dill pickle. And the Flamin' Hot, that font, that implies that's Flamin' Hot

Cheetos, right? Mm. Better. Still not that good. Last in this group is a chili limón. Yeah. These are coming home with me. Other flavors in this category that I couldn't get at the time of filming, cheddar jalapeño and sweet Southern heat barbecue. I was totally able to buy them online. I get a thing in the mail two days ago saying the post office is holding them ransom and wants 5 more dollars for postage for me to pick it up. Not happening. I will not be intimidated by the United States post

office. You keep the chips, all right? Also what I couldn't get at the time of filming was honey barbecue, Chesapeake Bay crab spice, adobadas, which is a different spicy chip which is actually very good. I was bummed I couldn't get those. And the Doritos Cool Ranch Lay's, unfortunately. Let's now talk about two exclusive flavors that are in both countries, but slightly different. We have the sizzlin' hot Lay's and the American-style cream and onion. It was previously known as American sour crea

m and onion. It's great. No fuss. One of my favorite flavors. It's been there for, like, over two decades, I feel, in India, and there's a reason for that. Ours is just regular sour cream and onion. And I also got American-style sour cream and onion from India. And then, one after the other. The flavor on these are much stronger. And it even says, "Now with more flavor." This is more flavor? I gotta say, I like these India ones better. Up next, we have sizzlin' hot. This is a flavor I've actuall

y never had. I'm very excited to see how it stacks compared to magic masala, which is already pretty spicy. Whoa. Yo, look at this chip. It's literally red. Not really -- oh. Nice. It's not as much a direct heat as the magic masala. Hey, this is a nice flavor. In the US, we have Flamin' Hot flavor. Now, let me explain. This is Flamin' Hot kettle chips. Couldn't get the regular Flamin' Hot. We'll get into kettle chips later. It's, like, regular spice. It has a heat to it without being too specifi

c. I think they use these red chilies right here. It packs a nice punch without being too overwhelming with the flavor. They're, like, the perfect amount of heat without getting too overwhelming, so. OK, so we don't only have ridge-style chips, we also have some flat ones. In fact, they're called wafer style, which I think is pretty much your classic style of Lay's. The first flavor is salt with pepper. Not salt and pepper. Don't you dare say that. It's very nice. I should buy these more often.

I've never tried these before. Very good job. OK, on to the next wafer-style chip. We have sun-dried chili. Mm! I love sun-dried anything. Beam that sun ray onto any vegetable. I will eat it. Oh, damn. This is really good. They smashed it with this one. Got a proper kick as well. Ooh! It's really yum. And one of the most beautiful sights you'll see in India is people sun-drying their own chilies on their roofs, porches, wherever. Biryanis, curries, they all use sun-dried chili. And this chip's p

acket really has nailed this flavor. Maybe my favorite, kettle cooked. We already saw the Flamin' Hot kettle cooked. These are thicker chip. They transport a lot better, obviously. There are not as many broken. It's got more of, like, a potato taste to it, a potato snap. It's like ... I love kettle chips. Sea salt, cracked pepper. These are so good. Mm. Yeah! It's like ... booyah! [grunts] Sea salt and vinegar. This ain't your pond salt. This ain't your lake salt. This certainly is not your fjor

d salt. Why is salt and vinegar so good? Attention, everyone, my favorite kettle chip is about to be eaten by me. The jalapeño kettle chips. I'm not going to talk about Miss Vickie's because this isn't a Miss Vickie's video. And I hate to say it. These might be better. They've got the jalapeño flavor in there. It's not too spicy, so you can really chow down on these. Moving on, unfortunately, to something that I kind of can't stand, are baked. Wah-wah. You can get them in original and you can ge

t them in barbecue. Like eating cardboard. Lay's has something called the Better for You series. So we have these, and then lightly salted barbecue, lightly salted wavy. I mean, I want the salt, but, like, how much ... ? This is what paper tastes like. We got simply sea salt thick cut. And you can also get the simply barbecue thick cut. They have something called layers, which are these guys. Bite-size layers, crispy layers, tasty layers. You can get them in three cheese, sour cream and onion. I

've never seen these before in my entire life. Oh, the bag stinks! Oh, these are really bad. These are terrible. Whoa, these are real chemically tasting. Oh, my God, these taste like they were poisoned. And now for our next range of exclusive chips, we have Lay's Maxx. That's Maxx with two X's. Why the two X's? That's like saying it's more better. I have not seen or tasted these before. Starting with macho chili flavor. It is kind of ridged, but I would say it's more wavy. I wouldn't say it's su

per spicy. I kind of like that this one doesn't leave that burning sensation in your throat. It's really nice. Yeah. I don't know about the branding, but I really like this flavor. Next flavor, peppery cheddar. Whoa. All sorts of stuff happening here. There's, like, some mint to it. Oh, you know what this tastes like? This tastes like malai tikka, like chicken malai tikka dipped in pudina chutney. This is very unique. Our next flavor is sizzling barbecue. Oh, the reason this is called Lay's Maxx

, it's because it has max crunch, max flavor, and max taste. And I can wholeheartedly say both of these have delivered. Mm. It even smells strongly of barbecue, so. These work. They're great. More fun chip styles. I think we can call these the India style, but we also call them the wavy style. They are wavy, hence the name. And you can get them in original, reduced fat, honey barbecue, ranch, and you can also get them in salt and pepper, lightly salted, fat, low fat, if I didn't say that already

. The waves are, like, wider. You guys have, like, really condensed waves. Lay's apparently wanted to answer the age-old question, how can we copy something popular and make it much, much worse? And Stax were invented. You guys know what Pringles are, right? Of course you do. Well. [chip pieces rattling] Hear that? "We'll put them in a tube. They won't break as easily." Right? [chip pieces rattling] Holy f---. Look at this. Then what was the point of putting it in this tube? I hate this so much.

But to really prove my point, yo, dog, look what I got. By the way, paper too. Excellent idea, Dave Pringle, whatever your name is. F--- Stax. And now to our final set of exclusives, the gourmet collection. I've had a lot of gourmet food in my life, and I've very rarely been actually impressed with the food. Vintage cheese and paprika! Vintage cheese and paprika. Oh. If I had tasted this chip without any of the fancy packaging, I don't think gourmet is the first word that would come to my head.

Thai sweet chili gourmet. This literally tastes like the West Indies hot and chili, but on a flat chip. So gourmet is just packaging. That's what we've learned from this experiment with these two chips. Skippable. In addition to that, we also have Lay's Poppables. Poppables come in sea salt and vinegar -- oh, Julius Pringle! That was his name. Not Dave. They also have Poppables sea salt and vinegar, Poppables sea salt, Poppable white cheddar, and Poppable honey barbecue. OK, I don't want to eat

all these. What's the cereal that looks like this? Is it Chex? If you got these on accident, eat them, but I wouldn't reach for these over regular potato chips. Here in India, our Lay's chips packets come in five sizes. There's 30 grams, 50 grams, 73 grams, 104 grams, and 174 grams. The big boy. The party pack. I feel like I could eat this whole thing on my own, to be honest. In the US, our Lay's chips come in six variety of sizes. All the way down here, got a 28-gram bag, which comes in the mu

ltipack. Next up, 74.4-gram bag. In the middle here, there's also an elusive 78-gram bag. Look, I saw it on Target.com and Walmart.com. It exists. It just wasn't available anywhere in Southern California. I looked, OK? One step up, we have what I think is the classic grocery-store bag, 226 gram, aka the 8-ounce bag. You've seen it a million times. This is the one. Right next to that one is the family-sized bag, which I also couldn't get ahold of. 297.6-gram bag. I couldn't find it because the Am

erican family is dead. But what is alive and well is, of course, our biggest size, the party size, 368 grams. All you family-less partyers, Lay's has you covered. That means that the biggest bag in the US is this much larger than the biggest bag in India. But wait, there's more, or less, depending on the packet that you get, because according to Amazon, the weights of these different packets might vary. So they're given a weight range. The biggest weight difference is in our largest pack of 174

to 190 grams, which is a difference of 16 grams. So let's see how much we get in one packet. Ooh! 175 grams, one gram extra from what is advertised, which is, I'll take it. So let me show you what 16 grams of chips looks like, so you can see what you're potentially missing out on. It doesn't seem like a lot, but I think that's quite a substantial amount of chips you're missing out on. To be fair, they did write 174 grams only on the pack. In the US, our flavor bags weigh less than the original-f

lavor bag. Take this barbecue-flavored Lay's bag. It weighs 7.75 ounces, or 7 ¾ ounces. Yuelei, can we get in there? You see that? Thank you. Compared to the 8 ounce you get with the original bag. OK. Same price, less product. Now, Harry did research on that episode, so take it away, Harry. What? No, do your own research. According to Harry's research from the last Lay's episode, back in 2014, PepsiCo claimed the reason that there is a slightly higher price per ounce for flavored chips is the ad

ded seasoning. So then, Lay's, can you explain to me why this lightly salted bag gives you fewer chips than the original bag? It's more money but less salt, eh, Lay's? Check it out. The lightly salted, so less salted than this, also 7 ¾. While we're exposing potential Lay's lies, this 28-gram bag in the US supposedly contains 15 chips, according to Lay's website. Let's see how accurate this is. And I'm going to count all the chips in this 30-gram packet to see how many we have. I mean, it doesn'

t contain one whole chip. One. 12, 13. I mean, if we're doing it by chip-related piles ... six, 12, eight? Close to 18 chips per bag. Huh. All right, I'll concede. Cool, so that's 24 chips. I would say, realistically, this is, like, 20 chips that have been broken into many other pieces. But let's be real, they could've fit a lot more chips into this packet. And Lay's is notorious for filling it with air. It's actually nitrogen gas, which helps preserve the chips and also acts as a cushion to sto

p them from getting smashed in transit. I mean ... What would it have been like without the cushion? This whole bag would've been dust, apparently. But what is the air-to-chip ratio, you ask? Let's find out in a new segment I like to call the Ar-chip-medes principle. Can I just say, this is one of the weirdest things I've done in my life. A generous 55 ml of chips in this packet. Now let's measure how much the packet itself can hold in volume. Score! Ooh, this smells so bad. 900 ml. That's 845 m

l of chips that we could have had, Lay's. I feel cheated. I think to make it more accurate, let's do four. And then we'll fill this guy up, and then we'll divide by four, and that would give us the average of those. Does that make sense? Dust. Uh-huh, all right. Oh, man. All right. Can I please have the scientific chip-crunching nunchucks? Throw them! Ah! Whoa! Look out, chips. Pow. Pow. Pow. 2.75 fluid ounces per bag. Now that's science you can use. So, now we're going to fill this with water.

Ugh. The whole thing's 20, which is about 2.75. 17.25 units of whatever. Cubic fluid ounces? Even more interesting air information. Because of India's varied geography, the amount of air that's packed into these packets is different for different altitudes. For example, in cities of higher altitude, like Leh in the Himalayas, there is the risk of these packets exploding due to the low atmospheric pressure. And so, when they're sent there, they're sent with no air at all inside of them. And so th

ey run the risk of being crushed in transport, so they have to be taken as delicately as a crate of eggs. But what about price? This is our largest chips packet, the 174 grams. And on Swiggy and Amazon, this sells for about 78 rupees, which is about a dollar right now. And that equals ... rupees 0.44 per gram. About $0.005. And, yes, I did all of that math and conversion in my head. Here in the US, if we break it down starting with this big bag, the 226.8 gram, aka 8-ounce, bag, it's $3.99 at Ta

rget, or 316.58 rupees. Yes, it's a bigger bag, I know. So breaking it down per gram, we found that in the US, the cost is a 260% increase compared to India. While we do enjoy our Lay's chips, we also have a giant chip culture here in India. In fact, these are called hot chips, and they're sold all across India at stalls called hot-chip stalls, where, basically, they have a giant frying pan, and they cut the potato in front of you to these thin slices and fry it and give it to you nice, hot-hot,

fresh-fresh. And so, for 174 grams, which is the same as this, you're paying rupees 45 for a lot fresher chips. So as you can see, Lay's is competing against a giant chip market here in India and doing pretty well, I would say. Now for the burning question. Are there any questionable ingredients that are in your Lay's chips that you need to watch out for? Fret not, because Joe and I have found them out for you. As far as the basic salted version goes, you're totally fine. Both in India and the

US, they're made of potatoes, vegetable oil, salt. Warning! Warning alert! Here in India, some of our flavors have an ingredient called potassium chloride. In regular doses, this is completely safe, and it's a low-sodium alternative to salt. However, it's also one of the three ingredients used in the three-drug cocktail for lethal injections. Too much potassium chloride will cause irregular heartbeats, and, boom, your heart will stop. So if you've been thinking of doing a Lay's mukbang, be caref

ul. We don't have any of that in the US Lay's, but we do have food coloring, caramel color in our barbecue and honey-barbecue chips. Certain types of caramel color can contain a byproduct called 4-meI. Studies found that it caused cancer in rats and mice, leading campaigns in support of banning it from foods. Give me that dancing rat! All right. The FDA was like, "Meh, it's fine. Humans don't come close to the level of exposure that caused the rat tumors." But that didn't stop the state of Calif

ornia adding it to its Proposition 65 list of chemicals, quote, "known to the state of California to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity," end quote. Oof. Another ingredient found in several varieties of Lay's chips here in India is disodium glutamate, aka flavor enhancer 69. No, not 69. Flavor enhancer 627. But basically, it's used alongside MSG to enhance the flavor of the chips. Both the Food and Drug Administration, or the FDA, in the United States, and the European Food Safety Authority,

or the EFSA, consider disodium glutamate safe. But it's not recommended for babies, children, pregnant women, and lactating mothers, and also should be avoided by asthmatics or people suffering from gout. MSG, if you're wondering, is the commonly misunderstood ingredient known as monosodium glutamate which is added to a lot of Asian cuisine and gives it that umami flavor. In 2019, Lay's sued a bunch of Indian farmers for growing a certain variety of potato, FC5 variety, saying it has a patent on

that variety. This type of potato is ideal for snack chips, as it has a lower moisture content. But strike one up for the little guy. Farmers'-rights activists petitioned to the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Authority, and it agreed. PepsiCo, Lay's, cannot claim a patent over a seed variety. It was revoked immediately, and the Indian potato farmers are now flush with low-moisture-potato money. Let's go! So, which country has the unhealthiest chips? Let's compare the classics

first. A 28-gram bag of classic Lay's in the US contains 160 calories, 10 grams of total fat, 1.5 grams of saturated fat, 15 grams of carbs, and 170 milligrams of sodium. OK, so our Lay's nutrition is per 100 grams. So I did a little bit of math to compare it to the US 28 grams. Actually, Joe did the math. So if the math is wrong, blame Joe. OK, so we have 154.8 calories, total fat, 9.8 grams, of which saturates are 3.7 grams, carbs are 14.7 grams, and sodium, 142.8 milligrams. Wow, that was pr

etty close, actually. We're under the US in every metric except for saturated fats, where we are over 164%. And I think that's because we use palm-olein oil to fry our chips, and it's very high in saturated fats, unlike the US vegetable oil. What about the least-healthiest chip in each country? Over here, there are a lot of them that are tied to 160 calories per 28-gram bag. Show list. But we did find that the 160-calorie chips with the highest fat content are these. No! The cheddar and sour cre

am, I love these guys. Making them the least healthy. If I did have a bag that small, it would contain all of this. And here in India, our highest-calorific chip is classic salted. How lame. How is this the most calorific chip we sell here, Lay's? If I had to run an extra mile, it wouldn't be for classic salted. So you know what the next most-calorific chip is? Magic masala, baby. Blue Lay's. We had to end with this one. Super calorific. I don't know why I'm proud of that, but good. Great to kno

w that this is and forever will be the maharaja of Lay's. In the interest of science, I will taste this liquid. If I do this, make sure to subscribe to the Food Insider channel. I never thought you could drink a fart until today. That was quite ... it was like potato water with a hint of salt.