The 12 Tastiest Trader Joe’s Chips

If you think that finding the best Trader Joe’s chips isn’t an important endeavor, then please, feel free to grab a bag at random and risk extreme disappointment. Like so many Trader Joe’s products, Trader Joe’s chips vary wildly in quality. Some are delightful—perfectly seasoned, wonderfully crunchy, just oily enough. But others, for some reason, taste like fish food. 

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Seriously, one of the chips we tried tasted like fish food. Do you want to buy fish food chips? Probably not! And that’s why we tasted all of the Trader Joe’s potato chips and Trader Joe’s tortilla chips, so we could find the best chips at Trader Joe’s to recommend and steer you clear of fish food chips. 

Here are the best Trader Joe’s chips to buy.

Best Round Tortilla Chips

Trader Joe’s Organic Yellow Corn Chip Rounds

Some people don’t like their tortilla chips to have corners. If you prefer a smooth-edge chip, then these are the best Trader Joe’s tortilla chips for you. They’re super crispy and really corny (as in, they taste like corn, not like they tell a lot of pun-based jokes). They’re pretty sturdy (go ahead and buy that chunky salsa), but they’re not thick. And they’re not crazy salty, so they won’t overwhelm whatever you’re dipping them into. —Justine Sterling

Credit: Liv Averett

Rating:

7/10

Sporks

Best Thick Tortilla Chips

Trader Joe’s Truly Tortilla Chips White Corn

Do you load up a tortilla chip? Do you need a true unit of a tortilla chip that can carry the weight of a fist-sized scoop of spinach dip? Allow me to introduce you to Trader Joe’s Truly White Corn Tortilla Chips. These thick, crunchy chips are ultra sturdy. And they taste good, too. They’re lick-your-fingers salty. And they’d be even better with a spritz of lime. —Justine Sterling

Credit: Liv Averett

Rating:

7/10

Sporks

Best “Healthy” Chips

Trader Joe’s Vegetable Root Chips

Ever had Terra’s root vegetable chips? Did you like them? You’ll like Trader Joe’s version, too. A mix of sweet potato, cassava, and batata (white sweet potato), these Trader Joe’s chips are thin and crispy and they actually taste like root vegetables. They’re big, too. These are three-bite chips. Are they actually better for you than any other Trader Joe’s potato chips? Probably not. But you can still feel good about getting a variety of starchy root vegetables into your diet. —Justine Sterling

Credit: Liv Averett

Rating:

7.5/10

Sporks

Best Thin Tortilla Chips

Trader Joe’s Organic Blue Corn Tortilla Chips

The Trader Joe’s Organic Blue Corn Tortilla Chips are the best Trader Joe’s tortilla chips. They’re super light and airy and crispy with a deep blue corn flavor. They’d be good with pretty much any dip you can throw at them. And they’re flavorful enough to eat on their own, if you’re the type of person who eats plain tortilla chips. Please note: These are not the round blue corn tortilla chips. Those are the chips that taste like fish food. —Justine Sterling

Credit: Liv Averett

Rating:

7.5/10

Sporks

Best Tangy Chips

Trader Joe’s Chips in a Pickle

These pickle chips taste like fresh dill pickle. You get a ton of dill flavor and a lot of almost-sweet tang from apple cider vinegar. These Trader Joe’s chips taste like if Grillo’s pickles were potato chips. These aren’t necessarily the best chips at Trader Joe’s, but they’re going to go great on a tuna sandwich. —Justine Sterling

Credit: Liv Averett

Rating:

8/10

Sporks

Best Ridged Chips

Trader Joe’s Ridge Cut Potato Chips Salt & Pepper

We tried both the regular ridge cut chips with salt and these ridge cut chips with salt and pepper, and these were the better chips by far. They really taste like black pepper, to the degree that there’s real spice that builds in your throat as you eat. And there’s also a touch of tang that adds delightful intrigue. These Trader Joe’s potato chips are crunchy, but not kettle cooked crunchy. They’re some of the best Trader Joe’s chips to bring to a cookout. They’ll go great with a dog. —Justine Sterling

Credit: Liv Averett

Rating:

8.5/10

Sporks

Best Innovative Chips

Trader Joe’s Pizza Party Potato Chips

These Trader Joe’s chips truly taste like cheese pizza. It’s a real Wonka experience. A lot of pizza-flavored stuff tastes like oregano and tomato powder and nothing else. But these thin, savory, crispy chips really encapsulate the whole pizza experience. You get the tomato flavor, sure, but you also get the cheese. And then it all finishes with just the right amount of oregano flavor. Some folks weren’t sold on these, but they don’t like pizza-flavored stuff in general. If that’s you, keep on reading. But if you get down with Pizza Combos and Pizza Goldfish, you’re gonna really dig these Trader Joe’s potato chips. —Justine Sterling

Credit: Liv Averett

Rating:

8.5/10

Sporks

Best Flavored Chips

Trader Joe’s Organic White Truffle Potato Chips

These were truly a delightful surprise. We thought they would be chemically and totally soaked in fake truffle flavor. But wow, these are luxury in a bag. They are toasty and packed with umami flavor and not chemically in the least. They’re super thin and delicate. Put these on a charcuterie board or serve them with smoked salmon or even some cheap caviar. Looking for an affordable taste of Michelin-starred life? These are the best Trader Joe’s chips to buy. —Justine Sterling

Credit: Liv Averett

Rating:

9/10

Sporks

Best Bold Flavor

Trader Joe’s Cashel Blue Cheese Irish Potato Chips

Trader Joe’s

Boy, do we get excited when fall/winter rolls around and these seasonal Trader Joe’s chips are back on shelves. They’re not for everyone, but they’re for us. The blue cheese flavor is salty, bold, and funky as hell. Your first bite might be a WTF experience, but then you start craving the aggressive flavor. We’re pretty obsessed with these and we’d likely rank them higher if they weren’t seasonal. —Gwynedd Stuart

Credit: Liv Averett / Trader Joe’s

Rating:

9.5/10

Sporks

Best Pungent Flavor

Trader Joe’s Garlic Butter Irish Potato Chips

Trader Joe’s

In honor of March Madness, we recently did a broader taste test of Trader Joe’s snacks, pitting them against one another in head-to-head rounds of tastings. Of all the Trader Joe’s snacks we tried—which included everything from snack mixes to cookies—these Garlic Butter Irish Potato Chips were our ultimate favorite. They’re decadent and greasy and absolutely bursting with garlic butter flavor. The flavor seems to seep into every ridge in every chip (and these chips have a lot of delicate ridges). So why aren’t they number one? Well, for one thing, you never know when you will or won’t find these in stores. And they aren’t as versatile as our top two picks, although we decided they would be good as hell with some onion dip. —Gwynedd Stuart

Credit: Liv Averett / Trader Joe’s

Rating:

9.5/10

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Best Classic Chips

Trader Joe’s Ode to the Classic Potato Chips

These Trader Joe’s potato chips have been at the top of our best plain potato chips ranking for years. And, upon tasting them again, it’s easy to see why. They’re crispy and really light—almost like a Lay’s potato chip. But they’re better than Lay’s because they don’t taste like oil at all, they taste like potato. A potato chip that tastes like potato? It’s madness. These are so close to being the best potato chips at Trader Joe’s—and they are the best Trader Joe’s chips if you want a salty, thin chip—but there was one other that really wowed us. —Justine Sterling

Credit: Liv Averett

Rating:

10/10

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Best of the Best

Trader Joe’s Kettle Cooked Potato Chips

Do you like crunch? I said, do you like crunch!?! These Trader Joe’s chips aren’t just crunchy, they’re cronchy. They really embrace everything good about a kettle cooked chip. There’s just a touch of salt, but they still have a lot of good potato flavor plus a hint of that extra toasty almost burnt flavor. I absolutely adore these chips. They’re an all-around all-star—perfect for layering onto a sandwich, serving with dip, drizzling with chocolate, crushing to create the sound of walking through dried leaves if you’re a foley artist. They’ve got it all. They’re the best Trader Joe’s chips. —Justine Sterling

Credit: Liv Averett

Rating:

10/10

Sporks

Other Trader Joe’s chips we tried: Olive Oil Potato Chips, Organic White Corn Tortilla Chips, Ridge Cut with Sea Salt, Ghost Pepper, Everything but the Bagel, Blue Corn Tortilla Chip (Round)