#20: Finding a forgotten flavour of chips

Lays India used to do a lot of experimental limited-edition flavours back in the day. And I particularly remember a salsa flavour chips they launched in the mid-2000s. And they were delicious. They were spicy but from what I can recall, also had a hint of tanginess in the end that tasted really good. The terrain of the chips had ridges like most Lays India chips have and was available for only a very short period of time.

I asked a few friends, and while some remembered such a flavour from Lays but could not give me anything other than vague details. Google did not help either because I could not remember the name of the chips or what the packet looked like.

Did this flavour even exist or was I misremembering certain details? Or maybe I was mixing two different flavours and remembering them as one? I needed to know for sure.

After trying a lot of different keyword searches and reaching many dead ends, I stumbled upon a personal blog of a Costa Rican woman called Mari who according to the bio in her blog, is married to an Indian. She published a blog post on 17 March 2006 titled: India Week' - Indianized Goods in which she reviews and compares Indian versions of products from global brands to the ones available in her country.

And this was one of the products in this list:

Ah – tears of joy – I finally found it! I wasn't imagining it, the flavour did exist and it was called Lays Latino Style Hot Peppers & Salsa. The packet also looks familiar. So thankful to Mari for capturing this picture and writing this blog post which in itself is a very interesting read.

Now that I knew the exact name of this flavour, I was able to find a couple of more mentions of it on the internet. For example, it appeared on the "11 Weirdest Lay’s Flavours Around The World" list on a random blog.

Also found a short post on a food blog from March 2006, in which the comments section is arguing if it is culturally appropriate for a flavour of chips to be called "Latino Style".

But the most interesting bit that I found was an article on Exchange4media, a media news website, also published in Mar 2006

They released a video podcast for the launch of this flavour? Podcasts were still a very new thing in the mid-00s, so I am amazed they did this. I wondered if I could find this video podcast online. If it exists, I would really like to see it.

The article said that the podcast was released on the Lays India website lays.co.in. The website does not exist anymore so I headed to the Internet Archive to see if I could find any old captures of this website.

And sure enough, the archive of the website exists for a period of about two years from Feb 2006 to Dec 2007. And guess what the first capture of the Lays India website on the Internet Archive looks like:

Ha! After struggling to find anything about this Lays flavour on the internet for so long, here is the official Lays India website from 2006 that was specially made for the launch of this flavour!

There is an FAQ page on the website about podcasts. It answers questions like what is a podcast and how to add a podcast.xml file to a "podcatcher". There is also a bold claim here that this is India's first-ever video podcast.

I am now even more intrigued to find this podcast. There is a link to the podcast feed but does the podcast itself still exist? Thankfully, the podcast.xml file is available in the archive, but the feed only has one update and it points to a wmv video file that does not exist anymore. Not even on the Internet Archive :(

Ah, I was so close. Another dead end. I then scanned some of the other captured URLs of this website to see if I could find any other bits of information. I found many user-uploaded pictures, a lot of them, oddly enough, appeared to be from someone's marriage function. Some of these pictures were included in the "Latino Zone" section of the website along with comments and ratings. I was thinking what a nice and innocent time it must've been on the Indian internet for brands to include an open comments section and rating feature on their websites.

Inexplicably, there is also a file containing a bikini-clad desktop wallpaper-size image of Mallika Sherawat. No idea why the web administrator of the Lays India website needed to upload this picture to their web server. The 00s Indian internet was such a random and awkward place. They didn't know that every reckless upload they made to their web servers without adding proper access control restrictions could be lurked upon by anyone even years after the death of their websites.

There were also a few links for Lays Latino style ringtones, windows screen savers and theme packs. Standard free giveaways from the brands with a web presence at the time.

And then on the list, I found a few interesting-looking files. An mp3 file and 3 zip files of different sizes all titled "Latino_Salsa_Video". Could these be the video podcast files?

I downloaded these files and unzipped them. All of them contained a wmv media file inside. I played the 1 minute 51 seconds video. I had not opened a local file in vlc media player in such a long time, which made me a little sentimental. It was indeed the music video of the Lays Latino Style flavour, starring Saif Ali Khan, as promised by the original podcast.xml feed file. All 3 files contained the same video with different resolutions.

Even though I am aware it is just an ad for a product from a big potato snack company, it still made me giddy inside to find and finally play this music video after following such a long trail. I cannot lie, it has a very catchy tune too. I still don't understand why this video was distributed in the form of a video podcast? But I suspect it may have been because podcasts were a buzzword at the time and the MBAs at Lays India wanted to jump on the bandwagon.

I have uploaded this music video on YouTube so that everyone can see the first and the last episode of “India’s first-ever video podcast”.

And, in case Lays India decides to take this video down, here is the Internet Archive link for the original files.

I wish I could try this flavour once again to know for sure if it tastes as I remember it in my memory. Especially after going through this journey of finding this flavour again.

This made me think what if that Costa Rican woman wasn't in India at the time this flavour was launched? Or what if she didn’t bother to blog about it? Or what if instead of writing a post on her web blog, she decided to post on Facebook or Orkut?

Also, the Lays India website runs inside a flash player. And only a few months back, the Internet Archive added support for a flash player emulator that can play flash content from old websites, without which it would be impossible to view and access this Lays India website.

So many things had to be in the right place in this search which led me here. Some dead ends and some unintended discoveries. But most importantly, I no longer have to live with this slightly annoying and uncomfortable feeling of not knowing for sure if a memory of having a certain packet of chips I ate as a teenager was real or not.