9 Popular Baked Snacks, Ranked Worst To Best

The umbrella of salty snack foods expands far and wide — and there is certainly something for everyone underneath it. Whether you are a die-hard Cape Cod kettle chip fan or, like me, prefer chips in the sour cream and onion family, there is guaranteed to be something in the snack aisle for you. You don't even have to worry about missing out on your favorite snack foods if you're trying to adhere to a lower fat and/or calorie diet, as there are a couple of different baked snacks out there just waiting to be added to your cart. 

As the name would suggest, these snack foods are baked in an oven, rather than fried, which helps cut down on their greasiness and excess calories. However, you shouldn't have to compromise on flavor if you opt for a baked snack variety over a regular one — which is where my job comes in.

I taste-tested some of the most popular baked snack foods and ranked them from worst to best based on their texture, flavor, and how satisfying they were. Although some of these snacks were quite pleasurable and comparable to their fried counterparts, others fell flat and were sad imitations of the age-old snacks I've come to know and love.

A good potato chip is something you eat for pleasure. It should be flavorful, yet indulgent, and have that greasy, snack-like quality to it that sends you back into the bag for another handful. These Aldi chips offered the farthest from that.

Since there aren't any additional flavors besides "plain," your taste buds are seemingly allowed to discern different flavors that wouldn't be noticed in a greasy, salty chip. For one, the potato flavor of the chip comes through the most. It gives off the flavor of boxed mashed potato flakes. The salt isn't prominent enough to round out the starchiness of the chip, making for a bit of a "bleh" bite. 

I also think these Aldi chips, sold under the Clancy's label, are thicker than the Lay's chips that I sampled. As a result, they lack a certain lightness and crunch I've come to expect with a good potato chip. While the price of these chips is significantly lower than the Lay's chips I sampled for this ranking, I think if you're going to go baked, you also have to go bold — and these chips just didn't rise to the occasion.

Barbecue chips are not my favorite thing in the world. I think I have such a bad association with them because of chips like Aldi's, which are sold under the Clancy's label. These chips lean more sweet than savory, but a good barbecue chip should be able to align that sweetness with savory and umami components. 

While other barbecue chip brands are able to create chips with discernible smokiness and flavors you can tie back to applewood-smoked, mesquite, and hickory, this Aldi chip felt like it was wandering around with a blindfold on trying to grab on to the first smoke flavor it could find. It was confusing and the flavor seemed too haphazard to be successful.

The chip itself wasn't bad and had all the same qualities as the plain Aldi-branded ones. It wasn't as mealy as the Lay's chip, and I don't think it had quite the same greasiness either. But, I personally eat chips for their flavor, first and foremost, and if that's not good, it's not worth buying.

There are so many different Lay's potato chip flavors, and most of them are delicious. In fact, Lay's scores high in Tasting Table's ranking of the 20 best chip brands. But if you only tried its baked potato chips, you probably wouldn't think so highly of it.

The thing I like most about Lay's is what its baked version lacks: crispiness and lightness. The original Lay's has a light and airy quality to it. It's thin, crunchy, and wicked greasy. But, the thing that makes it so greasy and oily is part of what makes it a good potato chip. Why would you eat potato chips if you don't get that experience? 

When I held these chips up to the light, I noticed I could see through them in some spots, which suggested they were a little lighter than the Aldi ones. When I bit into them, I found they didn't have the same density and thickness as Aldi's Clancy's chips, which is what pushed them up in the ranking. However, I do have some big critiques here. I immediately noticed Lay's baked original potato chips were missing the overly-salty flavor that makes Lay's chips, well, Lay's chips. They were saltier than Aldi's, and I was grateful for that, but still didn't have the addictive and snackable quality I was looking for due to the missing saltiness.

Lay's is the undisputed king of barbecue chips – at least in my opinion. But Lay's baked barbecue potato chips scored the worst on our list of 10 BBQ chips ranked worst to best. I found that the flavor of these chips were much more complex than the solely-sweet notes of the Clancy's baked barbecue chips, which pushed Lay's up in my ranking. I suspect this is because Lay's packs on a little more salt than the conservative Clancy's. However, I still admit these chips have some areas that need to be workshopped before they're even worthy of a top spot on this list.

The first issue is these chips have too much flavor variation. Some chips are coated in the barbecue seasoning while others have very little of it. So, it's like the luck of the draw when you reach your hand in and pull out a chip. I think that Lay's could have doubled the amount of barbecue seasoning on its chips because, as it stands, the flavor is in a liminal space between being a plain chip and a barbecue chip.

Structurally, these chips encountered some of the same issues as the other Lay's flavors. Mainly, they're heavy and could use some more salt. I think the addition of the flavoring bogged these chips down and made them feel heavier than the originals — yet, they were still more flavorful. The baked barbecue chips were far from snackable, which pushed them down pretty low in this ranking. However, their mastery of barbecue flavors kept them from falling all the way to the bottom. 

If you see me willingly eating salt and vinegar chips, please call for help. I'm not a fan of the puckery nature of these chips, as I feel like the vinegar tends to override all of the other flavor elements — including the potato-y and salty notes. But these Lay's baked salt and vinegar chips? They're something that I can get behind. 

The one thing Lay's salt and vinegar chips did that Lay's barbecue chips did not was get a full, equal coating of flavor across every piece in the bag. Not once did I ask, "Wait, what kind of chip am I eating?" They were sour enough where they made their intent known, but not so much that the vinegar was the only thing you tasted. These chips had a better balance of potato-ness and acidity than most salt and vinegar chips I've had in my life, so I will give Lay's a pat on the back for that one.

But, Lay's still can't rest on its laurels with these chips. They still have that dried potato flavor that really puts a wrench in their overall snackability. They didn't feel indulgent enough to still be considered a snack food. As I've come to learn with the entire Lay's baked lineup, the lack of salt is a big and persistent problem. I would eat these chips if they were given to me, but I wouldn't go out and buy them myself, which is ultimately what earned them a spot in the middle of this ranking.

If you had to buy a bag of baked potato chips, I would hope that this would be the one you add to your cart. Despite being a subsidiary of Frito-Lay, Ruffles baked cheddar and sour cream beat out all the Lay's chips by a long shot. Each Ruffles chip was crispy, light, and satisfying, and I found there was an even coating of cheddar dust across all of the chips — for the most part. You would definitely be able to tell that you were eating cheddar-flavored chips, that's for sure. As for the sour cream part of the equation ... well, that's a different story entirely. 

There was a slightly sour essence to the chips, yet I wasn't able to pinpoint unequivocal "sour cream." I would have liked to taste something a little more tangy and substantial. That being said, their texture earned them high marks on my list. While it still lacks the lightness and "guilty pleasure" feeling associated with potato chips, they have a little more of a snackable feel than all of the other Lay's and Aldi chips that I sampled for this review. Moreover, the ridges on these chips same to their advantage, and I could foresee dipping them into a bowl of sour cream to deliver on that flavor more. The chips are sturdy and likely wouldn't break, even with a dip on top, which increases their overall functionality and value. 

I'm going to admit something shocking: Prior to this ranking, I had never had (nor wanted to try) Flamin' Hot Cheetos. Hot is just not a flavor that I like to eat for pleasure, and I don't like when it's the sole flavor in any food. Unfortunately, that was the case for the baked version of this iconic snack food.

I think they would have fared better on this list if there was a little bit more cohesion between the "Cheetos" flavor (cheesy) and the hot, spicy undertones. They're not five-alarm spicy, but they do leave a little bit of an aftertaste that makes you crave a sip of a bubbly, sugary soda. While this trait makes it an effective snack food, it bypasses the whole "cheesy" idea entirely. The only cheese flavor I got on the palate was that of nutritional yeast (or something close to that), when I first took a bite of one. But it quickly subsided and was replaced with an inferno of what I thought was chipotle and paprika.

In terms of structure, though, these are great snacks. They were super crunchy and satisfying to eat; I didn't grow tired of them like I did the other potato chips. If you like regular Flamin' Hot Cheetos, you may think differently than me, but I'm admittedly not a big fan of these.

The Flamin' Hot Cheetos were not my favorite because they didn't have anything to distract from the spice. But bring out the baked Flamin' Hot Límón Cheetos, and you might just have a recipe for success. The lime flavor is very zesty, and almost gives me the feeling I'm drinking a bottom-shelf margarita at a filthy dive bar. It's sour and distinctly artificial, but I don't think that really comes to the detriment of the chip. The lime definitely distracts from the spiciness and it's almost like the "hot" component gets muddled too much to be identifiable. You can also kiss any cheese flavor goodbye, as this Cheetos flavor does not boast any of it. So now that it's missing the "hot" and the "Cheetos," can I just call it a lime chip?

Like the other two Cheetos varieties I sampled for this roundup, the texture outcompeted the chips in every way. All the Cheetos are crunchy and satisfying to snack on, but that's only because of their texture — not flavor. It only scored above the baked Flamin' Hot Cheetos because I found the lime flavor slightly more approachable than the spiciness. 

Going into this ranking, I figured that the crunchy cheese Cheetos would fare the best — and I was right. Potato chips are really hard to transform into baked chips, since the greasiness is a big part of their appeal. But when it comes to Cheetos, well, the oiliness is subdued by the cheesiness and the crunch. They're supposed to be heavy, which is why they could get away with being baked.

As I suspected, the baking process really didn't transform the Cheetos all too much from the normal recipe. The crunchiness is more pronounced, and I found the cheese flavor to be slightly less detectable, but by and large, it's virtually the same as the regular Cheetos. I found these to be just as enjoyable as the ones I remember from my youth, and I'll admit that my hand kept creeping toward the bag to grab another handful after I had finished the first one. If you are a big fan of this popular snack food, you've gotta get your hands on a bag of its baked version. And for 50% less fat? I'll take 'em. 

In order to make an appearance on this list, these foods needed to have a unbaked counterpart — which is why you don't see things like Cheez-Its on this list. Once I gathered all snacks I could find that fit this criterion, I began tasting.

The first thing I looked at was the texture of the snack. The baking would theoretically alter every single item in this ranking from its greasier, unbaked form, but I wanted to see if the snack still retained its satisfying taste — even though it was not fried. I also looked at the overall flavor of each chip, which included things like saltiness, flavor complexity, and balance. Overall, a good snack should instinctively make my hand crawl back to the bag for more, which was certainly the case with my top pick on this list.