Why Your Favourite Crisp Is Actually About Who You Are

How a Spanish crisp brand became the most culturally loaded product in East London

“People are so keen to feel distinct enough to not be boring, but also aligned enough to be cool and in the right crowd… as well as your clothes or where you live, it’s the things you buy… it’s just a facility for your personality but in the form of a packet of crisps.”

Real Housewives of Clapton, Highsnobiety Status Economy Report, 2026

This is a quote that’s been living rent-free in my head recently. It came from the Real Housewives of Clapton, the anonymous Instagram account that has spent the last two years holding a mirror up to a very specific kind of East Londoner, the natural-wine-drinking, whippet-owning, Salomon-wearing creative professional who has gentrified Hackney and its surrounding postcodes.

It is, I’d argue, one of my favourite pieces of brand analysis published recently, and not written by a brand professional, but by a satirical meme account.

This is a piece about how that happened, how a Spanish crisp brand that has barely 13,500 Instagram followers and hasn’t changed its packaging since 2012 became one of the most culturally loaded products in East London, and what it can teach us about the new rules of cultural relevance.

There’s an Etsy print of a bag of Torres black truffle crisps next to a tin of Perelló olives, listed as “Hackney-inspired art.” It has sold for £25. People are framing a crisp packet and putting it above their sofa. When the Real Housewives of Clapton did a real-life collab with La Cave, a natural wine bar in Holborn, Torres truffle crisps and Perelló olives were the two hero items on the menu. Torres didn’t pitch that or sponsor it. An independent East London wholefood retailer built an entire “As Seen on RHOC” product shelf with the same two items as the canonical picks. The Hackney Post used “off-licences now selling Torres crisps and £5 olives” as shorthand for the entire story of a borough’s gentrification.

None of this cultural capital was built through traditional acts of marketing. 71% of consumers now say groceries are a form of lifestyle expression or cultural capital. 62% say a stranger’s fridge tells them how culturally clued-in that person is.
When luxury fashion became oversaturated and unaffordable, people took the same status-signalling logic and migrated it somewhere more accessible. Torres landed in the middle of that cultural move to cultural goods over fashion, at exactly the right moment, with exactly the right product.

“So it was luck”

Well, yes and no, here’s how I think they did it.

The distribution decision

The strategic heart of this story is a stocking decision.

Over the last few years, Torres moved from being stocked in farm shops to natural wine bars. The venues you choose choose you back. They confer meaning. Getting stocked at Furanxo or Mother Superior places Torres within a very specific set of values. The product didn’t change, but the context did. Context, in brand terms, does a lot of heavy lifting.

This is also how Torres and Perelló ended up culturally fused, although not through any formal partnership, but they were consistently seen in the same rooms. Same counter, same stockist, same cultural representation. An audience that kept encountering them together, repeatedly, in the same kinds of spaces started to understand them as a pair. The Etsy print puts them side-by-side, the RHOC menu puts them together.

Cultural consumers say they are 4x less likely to be influenced by traditional advertising than the average consumer, only 6% say an advert makes them more likely to try something. However, 26% say seeing a product in a local café or deli does, and 58% say a friend’s recommendation is the biggest driver. Torres’s distribution strategy mapped almost perfectly onto that discovery system. They showed up in credible spaces. Credible people found them there. Those people told other people.

The product did the work too

Distribution strategy alone doesn’t explain it. Plenty of products sit on natural wine bar shelves and go nowhere.

Torres has three things that make it unusually draftable as an identity object. Firstly, flavour distinctiveness (to name a few: black truffle, Iberico ham, and fried egg). Secondly, a price point that sits precisely in the considered-treat category, expensive enough to feel like a choice, not so expensive as to feel absurd (at about £5 per bag). And thirdly, the packaging.

Torres’s visual identity hasn’t changed since 2012. In a world of relentless brand refreshes, that constancy compounds into something that reads, over time, as deep self-assurance. It never needed to update itself because it was true to the brand already. Everything around it has dated.

Its strength also lies in its simplicity. In 2026, packaging doesn’t just have to compete on shelf, it competes on feeds. Products are encountered as image first, detached from price or context, and the ones that matter circulate through group chats, meme pages, and feeds as cultural objects. RHOC’s own verdict on this: “The look of a product is one million percent more important than what the product tastes like. I can’t underestimate how important it is.” Torres’s bag is bold, confident, and immediately legible at scroll speed. That matters more now than any amount of on-shelf premium positioning.

Why not marketing is marketing

Torres has only about 13,500 Instagram followers. It is not the traditonal social footprint of a brand that has achieved this level of cultural penetration. We could understand this to mean the penetration wasn’t built through social reach, or digital following.

Before

What’s also interesting is that Torres didn’t abandon their socials during this repositioning. Around 2023-24 the Instagram aesthetic shifted. Out went the bright, white, classic product photography that looked like every other premium food brand. In came something richer-toned, more textured, closer to the visual world of the spaces that were now stocking them. They started to create content that looked like someone who actually drinks natural wine took it. That’s the difference between a brand that’s trying to join a culture and a brand that already authentically lives in it.

After the change

IYKYK (if you know, you know) feels like a key part of what makes status items cool in 2026. It operates on scarcity of knowledge. The product can’t feel targeted at you, it has to feel like you discovered it. Part of what makes Torres function as identity shorthand is that not everyone knows it. When you put it on your picnic blanket in London Fields, you’re communicating membership of a group with a certain kind of taste literacy, and that only works if Torres hasn’t been on a billboard.

Torres’s TikTok presence is non-existent, and the hashtag is almost entirely content created by the venues that stock it. Bars filming their shelves. Wine shops showing their counters. Natural wine spaces are using it to signal their own credentials through what they carry. Torres didn’t make or commission that content. It works because the recommendations are coming from somewhere else. For these kinds of consumers, trust is earned in intimate circles, a friend’s recommendation, discovery in a local deli, or the feed of a niche creator. Scale without credibility erodes status and perceived quality. Torres grew by being discovered in credible spaces.

What brands can actually take from this

I can’t create a step-by-step, replicable playbook. You cannot brief your way into becoming someone’s identity shorthand. But there are things we can learn.

1. Distribution is a brand strategy. Where you’re stocked tells people what you are before they’ve tasted you. The decision about which stockists to pursue, and which to decline, might be one of the most powerful brand decisions a founder can make.

2. Consistency compounds, when your brand is true. The packaging that looked right in 2012 looks even more right in 2026, precisely because it didn’t move. Consistency accrues value in a way that chasing trends never does.

3. Silence, in the right context, reads as confidence. Torres showed up, consistently, in spaces that already carried cultural weight, and trusted the right people to find them.

Finally, product quality is the foundation on which none of this works without. Ultimately, cultural cachet built on a mediocre product collapses the first time someone actually tries it. Torres earned its place in the room because it is, frankly, pretty delicious.