Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Reviews by Flavor and tracking Gluten Free and MSG Free Chips

Hello folks!  Well, I promised three months ago that I would begin implementing the chips according flavor, type, and brand, and I've finally put up a tag indexing everything according to flavor now on the menu bar!  It turned out to be a lot of work, but it should be faster now to implement the rest: next up I shall have indexing by type of chip (potato, corn, nacho, etc.), and eventually by brand and some other categories.

Also, I have begun tracking products as to whether they are gluten and/or MSG free, using the 'Gluten Free' and 'MSG Free' tag.  While neither ingredient poses a problem for me personally, I've talked with a number of people that expressed concern over the MSG content of chips, or said they couldn't eat them because they had a severe gluten allergy.  Well, while a lot of chips still use MSG it turns out, a fairly large amount of them don't.  Similarly, a surprising number of chips are also gluten free.  (This has been pretty hard to impossible to track with the French chips, that mostly don't bother to inform you whether they are, so assume I they aren't unless I see evidence otherwise.) 

So for now, you can look at a list of the products I've reviewed which are gluten or MSG free by clicking on their respective tags (at the bottom of this very post!), and I should soon have an Index page of those products up on the pages menu bar for your convenience.  Alternately, you can check out Frito-Lay's website which lists gluten-free and MSG free products (in America only, unfortunately), or Utz's guide to the same.  And, you should be happy to learn that ALL Kettle Brand products are both gluten free and MSG free.

One important caveat to the gluten-free list: it tracks only products that don't have gluten ingredients, but the Frito-Lay site notes that some gluten-free products may possibly have been processed by machinery that previously was in contact with gluten-containing products, so keep that in mind depending on your degree of sensitivity and check out their website for the additional details.

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