Dallas-based Low and Slow Snacks Makes Better Barbecue Chips in Frito Lay's Backyard

For most people who enter the barbecue business, the journey begins at home with a small smoker in the backyard, where they experiment with various foods and techniques. In 2019, Jared Drinkwater was one of those dabblers and wondered what would happen if he put corn chips into his smoker.

“I thought it was really good,” Drinkwater said of his creation. “I smoked some more, and sent them to my eventual business partner, and he thought we might be onto something.”

That experiment lead Drinkwater to co-found Low and Slow Snacks, a startup snack food company based in Dallas that uses real smokers to improve the basic barbecue potato chip.

Dallas, of course, is Frito Lay’s home turf, and no one knows that better than Drinkwater; he spent eight years working for the snack food giant in brand marketing. But this was his first foray into the production side of the snack food business, and he soon learned that changing the potato chip game wouldn’t be as easy as tossing some chips on a smoker.

“At the time, I thought, 'Why is no one else doing this?' And I think it would be naive to think that no one else had done it,” Drinkwater says. “And then we came to the conclusion that no one else was doing it because it’s really hard.”

Drinkwater and his business partners set to work on perfecting the process of smoking chips, which took nearly three years of experimentation to nail down.

“You name it, we tried it,” Drinkwater recalls. “We’ve smoked every wood. We’ve smoked every salty snack on the planet.”

With the process refined, Low and Slow started reaching out to co-packers who would scale the process. Many of them balked, having no institutional knowledge of wood-smoked foods. It wasn’t until Drinkwater sent a sample of his chips to a plant owner in Florida, who had spent three decades at Frito Lay, that he found someone willing to take a chance on his process.

“He called me the next day and said this was the best chip he’d ever had,” Drinkwater recalls. "And he wanted to know what we needed to make it work.”

Drinkwater and his team flew to Florida for a meeting to explain what they needed, and the co-packer agreed to build a 3,000-square-foot smokehouse attached to his production plant.

That plant owner may be right; Low and Slow’s barbecue potato chip may be the best store-bought potato chip we’ve tasted. Most barbecue chips are just regular potato chips tossed in the same sweet seasonings you’d find in a bottle of sweet barbecue sauce. Low and Slow throws that notion out the window. When you open the bag, the aroma of smoke hits your nose right away. The chips are ridged like Ruffles, smoked with hickory, then seasoned with Low and Slow’s own rub. There’s such a thing as too much smoke, but Low and Slow seems to have hit the mark between subtle and overpowering. To paraphrase the Lay’s slogan, it’s nearly impossible to eat just one.

Low and Slow also produces smoked tortilla chips and smoked corn chips that are similar to what Drinkwater created in his own backyard. The corn chips are just as addictive as the potato chips but with a bit more sweetness. The tortilla chips may be the most subtle of the three, but the flavor really comes alive with a dunk into your favorite salsa. Drinkwater says plans are in the works for a smoked cheese puff and smoked pretzels, again leveraging real smoke to improve on the snack food standard.

Low and Slow has already found a home in Albertsons, Tom Thumb and Market Street stores across Dallas and Fort Worth. You can also find Low and Slow chips at H-E-B locations that are finally spreading into North Texas. While there’s magic in smoking chips, getting into big retailers may be a more impressive trick.

“Without question, my connections from Frito Lay are coming in handy,” Drinkwater says of getting his product on store shelves. “I knew people from Albertsons. I knew people from H-E-B. But all they did was get me in front of the buyers, and they see hundreds of products a week.”

The challenge of getting a buyer to commit to your product requires an appealing story and the ability to keep product coming in. And it doesn’t hurt that all things barbecue are very much on trend in the food scene, which definitely helps Low and Slow’s marketing case.

“You’ve got to have a really simple story that appeals to the masses,” Drinkwater explains. “And I can tell my story in three words: We smoke chips.”

In 2022, Drinkwater quit his job in marketing to focus on Low and Slow full time. He formally launched the product line at the Texas Monthly Barbecue Fest in November 2022 and got his product placed on store shelves this past summer. He's putting his marketing experience to work, starting with the people who would appreciate his product the most.

"We're really homing in on the barbecue community," Drinkwater says. "Barbecue fans really appreciate the fact that we're doing something with real smoke."

That means a lot of collaboration. Low and Slow chips recently appeared in Zavala's BBQ Bistro box. Low snd Slow also brought a truck to the Troubadour Festival in Celina where almost every attendee we saw took home a bag of the company's chips. For Drinkwater, the thought of taking on Frito Lay in its own backyard isn't a daunting one.

"Yeah, it's a big market, but we've got a really innovative product. No one is doing this. I think it's a combination of doing something really innovative but with a really simple story," Drinkwater says.

"If you're a barbecue fan, you've probably got a great barbecue memory. If I can get someone to open a bag of Low and Slow and think back to a cool barbecue moment, then we win."