Imagine you open up a bag of Lay’s Barbecue potato chips and, among the expected rust-colored discs of fried tubers you find a pair of bright green chips that look like some sort of St. Patrick’s Day gimmick. Turns out these chips are supposed to look like that; they just shouldn’t have ended up in your bag.

A Reddit user posted the above photo yesterday, along with the comment that “these chips were dyed incorrectly.”

But then someone who claims to work at Lay’s and seems to know what they are talking about chimed in with this completely reasonable sounding explanation:

Actually, these chips were dyed with green food coloring so they’d be easy to find coming out of the fryer. Several times a day the amount of time the chips spend in the fryer is tested, and this makes them easy to find. Someone missed them obviously.

Sounds good — you don’t want to mix in the tester chips with the finished product, so you dye them green for easy detection later down the line.

But was it true? After all, you don’t need to provide your work credentials to post to Reddit, and anyone can claim to be a Lay’s employee if they want to. So just to make sure, we checked with parent company PepsiCo, where a Lay’s rep confirmed:

“The explanation provided by the self-identified employee is correct. We do use dyed chips to help test frying times of cooking oil in our manufacturing plants.”

So there you have it. Next time you get a bright green Lay’s chip, you’re (probably) not hallucinating, and (probably) won’t hallucinate if you eat it.

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