A chip is a fried starch. It is crisp because it is dry and because the oil in it has not yet oxidised. Both of those are temporary states, and the bag is the only thing holding them.
Three things are working against you.
Oxygen
The fat in a fried chip oxidises on contact with air. That reaction is what produces the flat, faintly cardboard, slightly crayon taste that people call stale. It does not need humidity. It does not need heat. It needs air and time.
This is why snack bags are gas flushed before they are sealed. The puff in a new bag is not padding and it is not ordinary air. It is mostly nitrogen, which does not react with the oil. The moment you tear the bag open you let it out, and you are never getting it back.
Water
A chip is extremely dry, far drier than the air in your kitchen. Starch pulls water out of the air until the two are closer to balanced, and a chip that has taken on moisture goes soft and leathery.
Soft and stale are two different failures with two different causes. Most people use the same word for both, which is part of why advice about chip bags is such a mess.
Light and heat
Both accelerate the oxidation. A bag on a sunny counter does worse than the same bag in a cupboard. This is the cheapest fix available to you and it costs nothing.
What this means for whatever you close the bag with
Here is the part that nobody selling a closure wants to put in writing.
The nitrogen is gone. It left when you opened the bag, and no clip, clamp, zip or gadget puts it back. Everything a closure does happens after that loss. What a closure can do is limit how much new air moves in and out, and how much water vapour rides along with it.
That is a real job. It is also a smaller job than most packaging makes it sound.
Some honest consequences:
- A bag that has been open for four days is not getting rescued by anything. Buy a smaller bag.
- A closure that leaves gaps is doing a fraction of the work it appears to be doing. Air does not need a hole. It needs a path.
- Transferring the chips into a rigid container with a gasket beats every bag closure ever made, including ours. It is also annoying, which is why almost nobody does it.
- Rolling the bag down tight before you close it removes most of the air volume still inside. That matters more than which closure you then use.
Why we only ever talk about six inches
A SLIDESEAL is one piece of plastic with a slit through it. You fold the bag the way you already fold it, you slide the clip on, and the slit holds that fold under pressure along its entire length, which is six inches.
That is the whole mechanism, and it is the only thing we will claim for it. Six inches of continuous contact instead of two pinch points. What that is worth in your kitchen depends on your bag, your fold, and how long you leave it sitting there. We are not going to pretend to know.
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