10 Plantain Chip Brands to Explore Beyond Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe’s is famous for its snacks. It’s not uncommon to get addicted to one of its offerings and fail to find a good replacement anywhere (Looking at you, Mediterranean style hummus with pine nuts). If you’ve found yourself hankering for its plantain chips, but your store is out at the moment — something that definitely happens with this brand — it’s good to find alternatives.

Now, I know plantain chips. They were my absolute favorite thing when we lived in Placencia Village, Belize. For a year and a half, I was without Amazon (the horror) and couldn’t get tons of foods we take for granted here. But you know what I could get? Fresh, kettle-fried plantain chips, every single day, from the little wooden hut at the edge of the soccer pitch. One of the worst things about moving back stateside was my sudden inability to get good plantain chips. I’ve never really recovered. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to taste 10 different kinds of chips. 

The plantain situation has improved dramatically in the seven years since I moved back, but they’re still kind of hard to find in stores, which is why most of the following were bought online. I found three at Whole Foods, all of which were cheaper than the Amazon version, so I recommend trying there first. So whether you don’t have a Trader Joe’s nearby, or you just want to expand your options, here are 10 other brands to try, ranked from worst to best.

You can make plantain chips yourself in the air fryer, but I have seriously low confidence they would come out as well as when fried in standardized batches and packed on a conveyor belt. Yes, there’s more waste involved in store-bought snacks, but they’re often just better. As such, I wasn’t particularly surprised when the Naturalike African/Nigerian Plantain Chips, which were made without oil, came out tasting like something you’d make at home — and very possibly, given the lack of oil, in an air fryer. No, thank you. At $7.99, I’m out.

If you’re a health nut, these could still be the plantain chips for you. They contain nothing but plantains. No salt. No oil. Were they dried in the sun or a dehydrator? Possibly; there’s no information about that in their listing. All of which is to say: Purists unite. The rest of us, not so much. 

These were more or less flavorless, because plantains, like potatoes, need salt and fat in order to bring out their richly starchy taste. The plain treatment resulted in a snack that I’d rather avoid. I mean, seriously, I’d prefer to just eat a banana. A banana, people! (Okay, I really like bananas, but they are the litmus test for how boring something is, are they not?)

The Setton Farm Plantain Chips with Sea Salt were a bit better. At only $5.32, and with “sea salt” right there in the title, we’re already off to a good starch (Get it?). They were also cut to the right thickness and crumbled nicely in my mouth, whereas the Naturalike version was a bit too dense and crunchy. The plantains tasted fresh, with no hint of rancidity that a few of the other options had (more on them later).

They were, however, straight-up boring. For all the talk of sea salt, you could barely taste it. That made them flat and starchy. If I wanted a greasy, salty, umami snack, I’d choose potato chips over these. If I wanted to be healthy, I’d again simply eat a banana. In summation, they brought nothing to the table other than a lot of chips for a decent price.

The story isn’t much better with Inka Sea Salt Plantain Chips. For starters, they were $8.45, which is just a lot. Whole Foods says it carries these for less, and even though I couldn’t find them when I went in, I recommend you try there before buying them online. These chips were also faintly rancid, which is never nice to taste.

That said, they had some decent qualities. They had a nice crunch, and the plantains tasted creamy once you chewed them for a bit, which is my favorite effect when it comes to a good chip. Usually this tells me they’re fresh, because old plantains just get brittle and weird when fried (Odd, since they also had a rancid flavor. Go figure).

My main gripe is that, given the ingredients list contained only oil and salt, I would have expected these to bring more flavor. They weren’t salty enough — again, despite the name — so like the others, they were boring. I guess you’re just supposed to enjoy the health benefits of the purported salt? Whatever the case, it’s not good enough for us.

I want to take a moment to say that none of the chips on our list so far are bad, per se. I would eat all of them over nothing if I really wanted a fried snack, but as someone who knows what a plantain chip should taste like, Numbers eight through 10 were a bit of a letdown. From number seven onward, we’ve reached the part of the list where I’d recommend picking up a bag.That said, for $6.99, Bansi Salted Plantain Chips isn’t the bag I’d point you toward first. 

These plantain chips were good, and they did have a starchy, satisfying plantain taste, but again, they weren’t salty enough. To be fair, the label doesn’t say “salted” in this case, even though the ingredients list includes it along with oil and plantains.They had a nice crunch, though. I wouldn’t get them over the options below, but I’m not averse and would eat them if they were all that was being offered. If you’re watching your sodium, this is perhaps a good way to go.

Plantains are traditional in many Latin American dishes. They’re frequently served in Cuban fare, and we got them alongside fish, beans, and eggs when we lived in Belize. Occasionally, we even cooked them at home. So to taste chips whose flavor hailed straight from Latin America was a nice hit of nostalgia for me. At $3.17, Zambos Plantain Chips Original pretty much checked all the boxes for a good cheap snack.

They somehow had a more potato chip-like crispiness, shattering in my mouth like Lays, rather than being a dense round circle like some of these other plantain chips. Partially this was because they were sliced thinly on the diagonal, which made for more frying surface area (and is closer to how they’re made in Belize).

I do have a few complaints, though. First, they still weren’t salty enough. Am I a salt addict? Maybe, or maybe manufacturers need to take note and add more freaking salt to their plantains. Secondly, this is the only option on this list that has an ingredient beyond the traditional plantain-oil-salt trifecta. It’s called TBHQ, or tertiary butylhydroquinone, and it’s an additive that helps to preserve food by acting as an antioxidant. Whatever it was, I tasted it, and I know I did, because I had a “what the heck is that flavor?” reaction before looking at the ingredients list. It tasted good, though, so whether you try this one will come down to how you feel about food additives.

At $3.19, the Barnana Organic Plantain Chips with Himalayan Pink Salt stood out in multiple ways. They were sweeter than most of the others (with the notable exception of the Iberia Maduritos, which we cover below). Plantains are supposed to have a sweet, starchy vibe, so we were down with this. Plus, they were salty enough (thank goodness!) without being overly salty, and we liked their ridge-cut effect.

However, they tasted more like salty banana chips than plantains, partially because they were cut a bit too thick. While banana chips are supposed to be thick and crunchy, it isn’t a great effect for the plantain, which is not as candy-like. Part of the sweetness may stem from their being fried in coconut oil, which is itself naturally sweet. This version wasn’t a favorite, but it still only had three ingredients, and its density would make for a great hiking snack on a day trip or thru-hike.

Let me start by saying that I love Terra Vegetable Chips more than life itself. They are an ambrosial mix of fried sweet potato, regular potato, and parsnips, and while they can be expensive, I often find them for cheap at Grocery Outlet or other discount stores. Naturally, I also had high hopes for their cousin, the Terra Plantains Real Sea Salt Vegetable Chips. I was not disappointed. 

At only $4.33 online, these plantain chips are a decent deal for the size of the bag. Plus, like the brand’s veggie chips, the plantains were cut wafer-thin, just like my preferred treat in Belize. These tasted buttery and they were nicely fried — salty but not too salty. With only oil, salt, and plantain in the ingredients list, they’re reasonably healthy, and I’d happily eat them on their own or as a vegetarian game day snack spread.

There is a difference between plantains and bananas. They are similar, of course, both coming naturally packaged in long, yellow peels and containing similarly starchy interiors with black seeds. They’re also both terrible in fruit salad, given their carb-forward makeup. However, they have two distinct flavors that are usually pretty apparent. Plantains taste notably starchy, similar to a potato, while bananas are creamier and taste sweet. If you were to taste the Iberia Maduritos Naturally Sweet Plantain Chips blind, though, I’m not sure you could taste the difference at all. Like I said, I’m obsessed with plantain chips, and I couldn’t even tell.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. These chips were really good, as their ranking suggests. They contained no added sugar — the label only listed oil and plantains — so I’m assuming it was down to ripeness. Much like bananas, they get softer and sweeter as they age. Though that makes them more difficult to work with due to the mush factor, the flavor still comes through in a chip. For that reason, the Iberia Maduritos would make a lovely replacement for a cookie in the afternoon when you hit that slump. Overall, if you like your plantains on the sweeter side, this is a good Trader Joe’s replacement, especially given they’re only $6.99 for a giant jar.

In general, I find the Whole Foods brand to be pretty reliable, and it didn’t let me down here. The Whole Foods Sea Salt Plantain Tostones were only $3.49, contained only the standard three ingredients, and came in a large enough bag that a group could enjoy them. These were one of the only options that had enough salt, and as you by now will guess, I rejoiced in that fact.

My only caveat is that the plantains were a little thicker than I would have liked. However, they’d also been fried to hell, which gave them a nice, lacy effect. I’m not one to pooh-pooh too much fat, so I’ll take it. Between the price, the ingredients, the flavor, and the crunchiness, this is a shoo-in for second place.

In first place, also available at Whole Foods for only $4.79, we have the Artisan Tropic Sea Salt Plantain Strips, and man are they tasty. Once again, they contained only three ingredients, and once again, they were actually salty enough. They’re thick and crunchy, but become soft when you bite into them, which is exactly the sort of consistency I want plantain chips to have. As for flavor, they were perfect as well: richly umami, with a hint of sweetness.

It’s worth noting that we ate these last and still liked them the best, so they’re not just good … they’re really, really good. The price is decent too, but make sure you go to the store to get these, because the online price was not good at all. The only caveat is that, if you’re willing to buy in bulk, you will pay less for the online version, and you may even be able to find this Trader Joe’s substitute at a giant warehouse store like Costco or Bi-Mart.

In our pursuit of plantain chips to fill that Trader Joe’s craving, we tried to sample as widely as we could. Unfortunately, as I touched on above, this was difficult to do in stores. My neighborhood grocery didn’t have a single option, and Whole Foods only had three of the 10. Thank goodness for the internet, which is where we purchased the other seven choices, though often for more than would be worth it on the typical household budget.

To decide which ones we liked best, we sampled each in turn and noted its flavor characteristics: crunchiness, saltiness, flavor, and any other factors that might distinguish it from its cousins. Some were a bit sweeter, some claimed to be salty but weren’t, some had odd flavors or a touch of the ol’ rancidity, and so forth. We used these factors and our gut instinct to rank them in the list above. Honestly, though, since the point of this article is simply to give you alternatives beyond Trader Joe’s, you can safely choose any of these to nosh on.

As for ingredients, most of the products on this list contained only oil, salt, and plantains, so that’s not a real distinguisher. Price was more so, since some are affordable at the store or online, and some really aren’t. As always with our taste tests, from chocolate ice cream to fast food pizza, you can use these variables to determine the likeliest best options for you.