Sunday dinner in a bag
Tesco are now stocking Marmite-glazed roast potatoes, as a snack, in a 350g bag, for £3.50. Whatever next.
Properly, they are small chunks of roast potato (skin on, properly browned, the size of a small new-potato half) coated in a Marmite-and-butter glaze and bagged in the same crinkly foil-lined pouch you would expect for posh crisps. They sit in the snack aisle next to the Tyrrell’s and the Pipers, priced like a premium nut bag.
This is one of the more genuinely surprising Marmite spinoffs of the year. Crisps were obvious. Cashews were obvious. Mac and cheese was obvious. Roast potatoes, in a bag, on the shelf next to popcorn, were not obvious.
What they actually taste like
They taste, mostly, like a roast potato that has been brushed with Marmite-butter and given an extra few minutes in the oven to crisp up. Which is to say: very good. The Marmite is well-judged (the dose-control problem again, and they have nailed it), the skin is properly crisp, the inside is fluffy. They are recognisably the same flavour as the home-made version of “roast some potatoes, brush them with Marmite-butter for the last ten minutes”, but in a portable, pre-cooked format.
Texture-wise, they are denser than a crisp and lighter than a proper hot roast potato. Think of them as somewhere between a cocktail-snack potato and a tapas patata. Eaten warm (a couple of minutes in the oven) they are excellent. Eaten cold from the bag they are still good but the Marmite glaze is at its best when the potato is warm.
What you actually do with them
Three answers, in order of how likely you are to actually do them.
Eat them straight from the bag like crisps. You will. They are designed for it. The 350g bag will not survive an evening of telly.
Reheat them as a side dish for a quick midweek dinner. Five minutes in a hot oven, served alongside grilled chicken, lamb chops, or a sausage and onion gravy. They do the work of a proper roasted side without the hour of prep.
Use them as the potato in a Tuesday-night Sunday-roast-mood meal. The combination of these, a bit of gammon, a poached egg and some greens is properly satisfying and takes about twelve minutes.
You will not, despite the M&S-style serving suggestions on the back, take them on a picnic. They are too rich for picnic food.
Will they last on shelves
Limited editions in the Marmite catalogue have a roughly 50⁄50 hit rate. The Marmite XO faded. The peanut butter survived (and survived a discontinuation, see its discontinuation and comeback). The hummus has held a small but real shelf presence. The popcorn slab is a slab, and slabs do what slabs do.
The roast potatoes have the structural advantage of being a genuinely useful product, not just a novelty flavour. If the price-per-gram comes down a touch from £3.50 a bag, this becomes a regular shopping-list item. If the price stays where it is, it stays a treat. Either way, I would bet on a second batch by autumn.
Anyway
Buy a bag. Try them. If you have not already, you are about to discover that the home-made Marmite-roast-potato trick (which is the seasoning that turned my own roast dinners around about a decade ago) now comes in pre-made form, and is, surprisingly, almost as good as the one you would make yourself.
The Hate Party will dismiss them. The Hate Party can eat their plain salted crisps and live in their grey, sodium-restricted world. We have roast potatoes in a bag.
Source: Tesco, April 2025; my own kitchen.
