Every Walkers crisp and snack sold in the UK broken down by bag size, checked against NHS daily salt limits from age 4 to adult.
Walkers is the UK's biggest crisp brand and the one most likely to be in a school lunchbox. The range runs from 16g Quavers bags to sharing bags many times that size, across potato crisps, corn puffs and baked snacks.
Unlike chocolate or cereal, crisps are not a sugar problem. A 25g bag of Ready Salted contains around 0.2g of sugar. The numbers that matter here are calories, salt and saturated fat, and the one that catches parents out is calories.
Ready Salted has one of the shortest ingredient lists in the snack aisle: potatoes, sunflower and rapeseed oil, and salt. Walkers switched the core range to sunflower and rapeseed oil, which is genuinely lower in saturates than the palm oil blends used in some competitor crisps. A 25g bag contains roughly 0.6g of saturated fat.
The flavoured lines are a different product. Monster Munch, Quavers and Wotsits are built from maize or potato starch with seasoning systems containing monosodium glutamate, hydrolysed soya protein, whey permeate, added sugar and colours. These are formulation ingredients, not nutritional ones. They are safe, but they mark a step up in processing from a plain crisp.
Walkers has cut salt substantially over the past two decades. At around 1.2g per 100g, the core range sits in the amber band on front-of-pack labelling, not the red. A 25g bag delivers about 0.3g of salt, roughly 10% of the daily limit for a child aged 4 to 6.
Calorie density is where crisps do their work. At roughly 530 calories per 100g, a 25g bag is about 130 calories and a grab bag is closer to 250. That is not extreme in isolation. It matters because a bag of crisps is almost always eaten in addition to a meal rather than as part of one, and because bag size varies by a factor of six across the same product.
Walkers markets several lines on calorie count, with Quavers at 86 calories a bag and Wotsits at 90. Those figures are accurate, and they are also for the smallest bags in the range.
Each product page includes a full nutrition breakdown at every bag size sold, age-adjusted NHS salt and saturated fat calculations from age 4 to adult, an interactive calculator for your exact age band and portion, and a plain guide to what the ingredient list actually contains.
