Study Reveals Which Popular Chip Brands Have The Best Chip to Empty Air Ratio

One of the biggest gripes folks have with chips is that almost half the bag is comprised of air. Sure it makes sense for packaging reasons, and you wouldn’t want your chips to be crushed, but large part of us are still salty that there aren’t more chips to occupy all that empty space in the bag.

Which now begs the question, how much air-to-chip ratio is really out there and what brands give you more snack for your money?

Kitchen Cabinet Kings did a recent study to see exactly how much air was inside your favorite bags of chips.

To do so, they purchased 14 different chip brands that ranged from Ruffles to Fritos and measured the air-to-chip ratio for each of them.

For testing, they used the water displacement method to measure air percentage. This is where the bags are submerged to calculate the amount of air left over in the bag versus chip content.

Here are their findings:

As you can see from the image above, some chip containers are filled with as much as 59 percent air. A few, however, only boast about a little more than half.

So what chip brands will give you the most for your money?

They discover that Fritos, Pringles, and Tostitos were the brands lowest in air and highest in snack content. While knowing this probably won’t stop me from crushing a bag of Cheddar Sour Cream Ruffles, I will begrudgingly eat those chips knowing the bag’s about 50 percent empty.

The full infographic can also be seen here.