One of the things that I always look forward to on vacations out of town is tracking down new and interesting foodstuffs.  Whether it’s some local flavors that are new to me (as a fer’instance scoring some Cincinnati chili and Chicago-style deep dish pizza recently), or something that’s even more exciting to my pop culture obsessed mind, new brand name product offerings (in particular new soda and snack flavors.)  As I’ve mentioned on the site before we tend to visit Florida an awful lot and I am convinced that the Orlando area is a test market for some of the larger snack, soda, and candy companies.  We always tend to find new stuff there, and it’s always months (if ever) until we see this stuff filter up to Georgia.

This past trip was no exception even though pickins were sort of slim.  Besides finding some single bottles of the all-in-one A&W brand Root Beer Floats (which are only available in hideously expensive 4-packs here), the big score this time were a couple bags of very odd flavored Combos snack crackers.  Now I say very odd, but only one of them was really weird, so I’ll start with the more normal Cheeseburger variety…

Now I grew up with some weird flavored snacks all my life, as there always seemed to be Snyder’s brand chips in our area.  Snyder’s was the brand that had flavors like Steak & Onion, Meatball Pizza, and the almost normal Dill Pickle, so I’m familiar with the idea of savory beef-flavored snacks.  The complexity of intermingled flavors that companies are trying to achieve with Cheeseburger these days though is a little more out of the ordinary.  I first saw this last year when Doritos held their first mystery guess-the-flavor contest.  The above bag of Combos has this zany flavor intermixed with the cheese filling and it tastes almost exactly like last year’s Doritos did.  The problem I see with this odd Cheeseburger flavor is that the food scientists aren’t shooting for any one common cheeseburger flavor (like a creamy beef to simulate the burger and cheese), but practically every possible flavor you might have on a fully loaded burger.  There are the obvious hints of cheese (as the filling is cheese-based, well at least a close approximation of a cheese-like substance) and a more subtle beefiness, but there are also strong hints of pickle, ketchup, and mustard, which end up skewing the overall taste towards a very tart place.  All in all, it’s not as much weird, as it seems to be a misfire, and would be better labeled as “Cheeseburger Condiment Flavored”. 

The second new Combos flavor on the other hand (Bacon, Egg, & Cheese) is just downright evil in both concept and it’s all too accurate flavors…

First off let me just say that snack crackers/chips should never, EVER, be egg flavored.  There is a certain spoilability to the thought of eggs, though maybe it’s just me.  I’ve always been of the mind that eggs should be eaten fast (unless hard boiled, and even then it’s certainly not a tempting idea for a snack chip flavor), and in small quantities, as they tend to get cold and sort of sickening the longer you leave them out.  It probably doesn’t help that bacon flavoring has always been something you’d typically find in either soup mixes or dog biscuits, and it just seems a little weird in chips (though I think Pringles has managed to pull it off in the past.)

Personally, as they Combos are almost as bad for you as eating a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese biscuit, I would much rather just go ahead and eat one that a very disturbingly close flavored approximation of one in snack cracker form.  I wonder if Jones soda will ever come out with a set of breakfast flavored sodas?  If so, I hope they contact the food scientists working feverishly at the Combos Company because they certainly nailed the flavor…