These Honey-Glazed Sweet Potato Chips are a perfect snack year-round. Natural sweeteners are trending forward, as are sweet potatoes in chip applications.

Several snack producers offer sweet potato chips, including the General Mills brand Food Should Taste Good and the Hain Celestial Group brand Terra. Popchips also offers sweet potato chips, including a Sweet Potato Cinnamon Twist product.

Foodservice operators likewise continue to add sweet potato sides like chips and fries, with McDonald’s most-recently test-marketing sweet potato fries at locations in Texas. These sweet-savory chips would also make an exceptional addition to any foodservice menu.

With only four ingredients, all of which can be sourced as natural, this sweet snack delivers a clean-label promise consumers crave. A mainstay in the arsenal of bakers, honey’s popularity is booming as a sweet ingredient often used to provide balance in savory snack applications. In sweet potato chips, honey not only provides an element of sweetness, it also gives a depth of flavor to the finished product. The gluconic acid found in honey helps enhance the flavors of spices and herbs, elevating the cinnamon used in this formula.

Chip products that add multiple root vegetables to the mix also add diversity to the category. Snack producers have found success in adding beet, along with blue and purple potato varieties, to bring flavor diversity and vibrant colors to products—an approach that could work well with this honey-cinnamon, sweet-savory concept.

Snack producers can put their own spin on these Honey-Glazed Sweet Potato Chips through ingredient selection. Honey suppliers offer more than 300 varieties of honey, each with its own unique flavor profile. Honey’s flavor profiles are derived from the floral source where the bees gather nectar. For example, if bees forage in fields of clover, the end result is clover honey, a very common variety that offers mild flavor. When bees forage next to orange groves, orange blossom honey is the result—a variety that likewise has a mild flavor, but one that can also add a slight citrus note. The wide range of honey varieties gives product developers the ability to create chips with specific flavor profiles, ranging from semi-sweet to robust—and if a single variety of honey is used, such verbiage could add interest to the label. Honey suppliers can also custom-blend honey types to create a unique, signature honey for a specific product line.

For more information, visit www.honey.com.