Pringles taps TikTok’s ‘rat snacks’ trend. Who’s next?

Rat snacking opportunities explained

• Consumers’ improvised snack combinations give bakery and snack brands ideas for new flavours, serving occasions and partnerships.
• Pringles demonstrates how creator content can show shoppers another use for an existing product without requiring a new launch.
• Sour flavours overlap with rat snacking, with rising sales of pickle-flavoured products showing an appetite beyond social media.

I can think of few things less likely to make it onto a crisp packet than instructions to crush the contents, drench them in vinegar and eat the resulting soggy mix with a spoon. Yet that’s the ‘chip soup’ TikTok creator @ken.eurich shared with her 1.4 million followers in 2023, while crisp manufacturers were spending fortunes to get the crunch just right.

Bizarre might be an understatement, but I’m interested in why a snack that undoes so much product development attracted coverage beyond her own feed. Eurich helped put the decidedly unglamorous business of ‘rat snacking’ in the spotlight, and there’s more here for brand owners than an excuse to wince.

The name comes from the way rats forage for food, scavenging whatever scraps they can find. TikTok creators like dietitian Abbey Sharp (@abbeyskitchen) helped popularise the human equivalent to her 659,000 followers: raiding the fridge or cupboard and combining whatever satisfies a particular craving. Cheese, pickle juice, leftover bread and the bottom of a crisp packet all qualify.

If you’re grimacing, you’re probably not the intended dinner guest. These are often private pleasures, assembled when nobody else is around to question the ingredients. What interests me is how TikTok has given people an audience willing to admit they do it, too – and given brands a view of eating habits that rarely feature in polished serving suggestions.

Pringles has already found a place in these experiments through food creator Sam Schnur, who posts as @naughtyfork. She built cheeseburger-style bites using Pringles crisps, cheese, pickle, ketchup and mustard in a TikTok post carrying an #ad disclosure and the hashtags #ratsnack and #unhingedsnack.

Schnur has around 298,000 followers, giving Pringles access to a built-in fan base. I can see the attraction: show people another way to eat a familiar snack and potentially give them another reason to buy it, without requiring a new product launch.

When rat snacks meet sour cravings

At the risk of digressing, I have to mention how rat snacking has also given the sour-snack trend more legs. The two overlap when improvised combinations put sharp, briny flavours in front of large audiences, although a rat snack can just as easily involve peanut butter or chocolate.

Eurich’s vinegar-drenched crisps capture that overlap particularly well. Standard salt-and-vinegar seasoning, popular though it is, apparently doesn’t deliver enough of a mouth-puckering hit for everyone these days. Claire Snyder’s pickle wrapped in fried cheese attracted 1.6 million TikTok likes, while #pickleinablanket reached 6.4 million views by February 2023. The broader #ratsnack hashtag had accumulated 12.6 million views by January 2024 – a sizeable audience for eating habits people once kept to themselves.

I wouldn’t take that as an instruction to make every savoury snack more acidic. I would ask how much control shoppers want over flavour, and whether a separate seasoning sachet or dipping sauce could let them choose the intensity.

Pringles’ Spicy Pickle mystery flavour, revealed in May 2025, drew on Gen Z’s TikTok pickle obsession. The UK launch distributed 1.8 million tubes and prompted more than 6,000 guesses, showing how an online food interest can become a reason to engage with a branded snack.

Find the other half of the snack

The opportunity I find most compelling starts with products already on shelves. A brand might supply the cracker underneath, the tortilla holding everything together or the biscuit adding crunch, without needing to reproduce the whole homemade creation.

Pringles’ 2023 collaboration with The Caviar Co offers an example of responding to consumers’ pairings. In an article on its corporate website, Kellanova traced the crisps-and-caviar collection to people putting the two together on TikTok. “We teased the collaboration at the 2023 Coachella House, turning a social media trend into a tangible ‘thing’,” said David Lee, then at Kellanova and now senior director of global licensing and cultural marketing at Mars Snacking.

A partnership needn’t begin with a jointly developed product. Joint recipes, coupons or retailer promotions could give a cracker producer and a pickle brand a way to gauge interest in the combination using products already on shelves.

There’s a price question here, too. Much of the appeal of rat snacks is making something satisfying from ingredients already bought. Would shoppers pay for a ready-made version, or would packaging up their cupboard creation take away the very thing they enjoy about it?

Give them a reason to buy another pack

Part of the appeal of rat snacking is how little it asks of the person making it. A few ingredients, minimal preparation and something satisfying to eat are enough. A branded recipe requiring a special shopping trip could lose that appeal before anyone opens the packet.

That helps explain the value of creators showing combinations they already enjoy. As Sharp told US lifestyle magazine Bustle, “people aren’t interested in hyper-stylised content, they want what’s genuine, they want relatability. These rat snacks are becoming more popular because people often don’t see themselves making the smoothie bowls that they see on Instagram, but they can pull together a piece of cheese and a pickle with a pinch, because they have it on hand too, you know?”

The more revealing response may come after the likes and comments, when viewers recreate the snack in their own kitchens. Do they buy the same crackers, or use whichever packet is open? Does the branded flavour make the combination work, or could almost any alternative do the job?

Those choices bring the discussion back to the product itself. A cracker needs to support its topping and a wrap needs to hold its filling, however entertaining the video that persuaded someone to try it.

That’s where I think this gets commercially interesting. Consumers are already finding uses for snacks that brand teams might never have considered. Becoming the packet someone buys specifically to make their favourite combination again would give a brand something rather more valuable than a fleeting role in a strange food video.

Yes – there’s stronger sales evidence to lead with, including growth in units as well as spending.