Expo East Video: New Chip Strives to Make Jicama Hip

When it comes to chips, potato is almost passe, popped is popping, and kale is killing it. So while at Expo East 2015, we at Project NOSH couldn’t help but wonder: What’s next?

Enter Jica Chips, a new chip made from sweet, nutty jicama, a tuber that is popular in Asia and Mexico. Typically it’s simply eaten raw as part of a salad. What Jica Chips has done is bake the chip with a variety of seasonings (cinnamon sugar, white cheddar, soy ginger, sea salt or BBQ) to create a crunchy snack that has five times the fiber of a potato chip. Retail coverage is slight, but the brand is part of the Accel Foods incubation platform.

Jicama Chip founder Melissa Colella-Wang says that although the company has to educate consumers about what jicama is, it’s trying to capture both potato chip eaters as well as veggie (such as kale) chip fans. Additionally, because of jicama’s health benefits, the chip caters to more than just low fat snack seekers; giving the company a more diverse story to tell.

The #nextkale became a fairly popular hashtag for a while — here’s the story of a company trying to become the phenomenon.