When it comes to the crunch, new wheat snacks top crisps

Derby-based food firm Marbran has received an £18,000 grant from the Home-Grown Cereals Authority enabling the company to improve its new 'Crips' snacks brand.

The wheat and potato-based snacks sell themselves on being 70% less fat than standard potato crisps. "The crunch is similar, but after a few bags of our crisps, consumers find regular crisps greasy," says company chairman Brian Smith.

The product's manufacture is outsourced to a biscuit firm, but this initially posed a challenge for Marbran because biscuits are much thicker than Crips. "I'm a food technologist and so I tinkered with the ingredients to get the right balance between making the product stable and ensuring that it was still sliceable," says Smith. "It was a combination of relative ratios between the wheat and potato. It would have been easy to make the product tough so that it could be easily heated, but it needed sufficient tenderness to crunch."

The grant will enable the team to carry out research in order to reduce the product's salt levels, which currently stand at 1g per 35g bag. "We are looking to halve salt levels by the first half of next year by adjusting various flavours. Lemon gives a nice bite and adding spices can also help," he says.

The firm is also looking to cook the product in a different oil. "A year ago sunflower oil [which is currently used in Crips] was seen to be the healthier option, but now we are considering other fats such as sunseed oil." Crips are likely to adopt traffic light labelling once these goals have been reached, he adds.

Meanwhile, continuing shelf-life testing has revealed a key advantage of Crips. "They have a nine-month shelf-life," says Smith, though he admits that the long life aspect was an unintentional bonus. "This will be particularly important in the export market," he says.