Starbucks Kettle Chips Lightly Salted

Starbucks Kettle Chips Lightly Salted cost £1.55 and carry 206 calories a bag with 0.36g of salt and 2.6g of fibre. Kettle cooked crisps with sea salt.

They are the cheapest of the four Kettle Chips bags and the only one carrying a vegan label with no allergens declared at all. The Cheddar and red onion and sweet chilli bags both declare milk, and the balsamic vinegar bag declares barley, so this is the only genuinely unrestricted option of the four.

0.36g of salt is also the lowest of the four, against 0.64g for the balsamic bag, and 2.6g of fibre is the highest. For a plain bag with nothing added, that combination is what you would expect and it is worth knowing that the seasoned versions cost you on both counts.

Kettle cooking is the term doing the work in the name. Crisps cooked in batches in a fixed vat come out thicker, harder and more uneven than continuously fried ones, which is why the texture is different and why they carry no more fat despite feeling substantial: 12g here is the same as every other bag in this range.

Sunflower oil rather than palm is the other thing worth knowing about this range, and it shows in the saturated fat figures across all four bags. None of them exceeds 1.4g, which is low for a fried snack and directly attributable to the oil chosen.

Sugar at 0.2g barely registers and saturated fat at 1.4g is low, since these are cooked in sunflower oil rather than anything hydrogenated.

Plain crisps are also the ones that show the quality of the potato rather than the seasoning, which is the honest argument for buying them over a flavoured bag. There is nothing to hide behind: the flavour is potato, oil and salt, and a poor batch has nowhere to go.

Vegan and vegetarian labels both apply. Prices reach £2.20 on delivery. The lightly salted popcorn is the lighter savoury option at 88 calories.