Dressed to impress.

An age-old problem for many parents is how to get kids to eat their vegetables. In an age of hyper-palatable ultra-processed food, it can be hard to turn kids on to the wonders of spinach or even good old ants on a log. According to a survey of mothers in Japan, 90 percent want their children to eat vegetables, but struggle with the kids’ picky eating habits.

This is a problem that food research firm and seasoning maker Riken Vitamin has decided to try tackling. Some might recognize the name “Riken” as the name of Japan’s national scientific institute. That’s because this is a privatized spin-off of the research institute that came to be after finding and commercializing natural vitamin A extracted from fish liver.

Now, its goal is finding a way to get kids to eat their veggies, and after talking with some busy parents, found that sprinkling crushed potato chips on salads helped kids to stomach them. That seemed reasonable since potatoes are vegetables and have an inherent link with others, but potato chips weren’t designed for sprucing up greens. So, what if the deliciousness of potato chips was engineered to be even more compatible with vegetables?

After some research and development, and with the support of Japan’s leading potato chip maker, Calbee, a new kind of dressing was born: Calbee Potato Chips Seaweed & Salt Flavor Dressing.

This dressing takes the core flavors of Calbee’s best-selling flavor of chips and tunes them to pair especially well with vegetables. Even big fans of potato chips might quickly dismiss the flavor of chips in question as a mere plain flavor since seaweed more or less tastes like salt. But there’s a great deal of subtlety in the seasoning here.

These chips use two types of seaweed, aromatic aonori (sea laver) and flavor-packed aosa (sea lettuce), along with hints of chili pepper, sesame oil, and clam extract for added complexity. Riken Vitamin worked to retain as much of that flavorfulness as possible and used their own suji-aonori that they grew through land-based aquaculture.

Some serving suggestions by Riken Vitamin include the Chips Sandwich. Putting potato chips on a sandwich is certainly a decadent treat, but the same effect can be had by drizzling some of this dressing on some crispy lettuce in the same sandwich.

▼ Though the sandwich in their picture appears to also be using actual potato chips, which seems to defeat the purpose…

Another option is the Parfait Salad, which is a goblet full of vegetables and a hard-boiled egg for a little pizzaz, all topped with a splurt of Calbee Potato Chips Seaweed & Salt Flavor Dressing. If this dressing can get picky kids to eat that much vegetation in one place, then it truly is a winner.

Of course, the million-dollar question is how healthy this dressing is, especially compared to crumpling potato chips on salads. Unfortunately, a full ingredient list and nutritional information will likely have to wait until the product’s release on 1 August all over Japan. Hopefully, they won’t have problems with color packaging like Calbee currently does by that time.

Source: PR Times, Calbee, Riken Vitamin
Images: PR Times
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