Open any snack aisle right now and you will start noticing a colour that was not there a few years ago. A deep, almost velvety red, sitting between the pale yellows of banana chips and the orange of sweet potato. That colour belongs to beetroot, and it is showing up on more shelves every season.
This is not a coincidence and it is not a passing colour trend either. Something changed in how snack brands think about their ingredient lineup, and beetroot ended up right in the middle of it.
The Shelf Was Getting Predictable
This fits into a broader shift happening across the vegetable chip category in India, one that has moved fast enough that most shoppers have not fully clocked it yet. According to market research firm Grand View Research, India's healthy vegetable chips segment generated close to USD 290 million in 2024 and is projected to grow at over 10 percent a year through 2030, with root vegetable chips such as beetroot forming the largest single share of that category. That is not a niche corner of the snack aisle. It is the fastest expanding part of it.
For a long time, the vegetable chip category leaned on a small, safe rotation. Potato, sweet potato, sometimes a masala okra if a brand wanted to feel adventurous. It worked, but it also meant that once a customer had tried two or three brands, the rest of the shelf started to feel familiar. Same base ingredients, same colours, same crunch.
Brands noticed this before customers said anything out loud. Repeat purchase is hard to build when every product in a category looks and tastes roughly the same. Something had to break the pattern, and it needed to be an ingredient that already had trust built in, because asking someone to try an entirely unfamiliar vegetable in chip form is a big ask.
Beetroot solved both problems at once. It is not exotic. Most Indian households have used it in sabzis, salads and juices for years. But almost nobody had put it into a chip. That gap between kitchen familiarity and snack shelf absence is exactly the kind of opening a smart product team looks for.
The Colour Does Half the Work
There is no getting around it. Beetroot chips look different from everything else in the aisle, and that visual difference matters more than most people give it credit for.
A bowl of beetroot chips has a colour that photographs well, stands out on a shelf from a distance, and signals "this is not just another potato chip" before a customer has read a single word on the pack. In a category where most products are shades of beige and yellow, that deep red is doing marketing work that no amount of packaging copy could do on its own.
Brands are not blind to this. A product that photographs distinctively is a product that gets shared, gets noticed in a crowded feed, and earns attention without a paid push behind it every time.
What Vacuum Cooking Does for Beetroot
Colour alone would not be enough if the texture did not hold up, and beetroot is not the easiest vegetable to turn into a chip.
Raw beetroot has high water content and a natural sugar level that makes it prone to browning and going soft under high heat. Deep frying a root vegetable like this at standard temperatures tends to dull the colour and push the flavour toward something closer to caramelised sugar than beetroot.
Vacuum cooking changes that equation. By reducing the pressure inside the cooking chamber, moisture can be drawn out of the beetroot at a much lower temperature than deep frying requires. That lower temperature is what preserves the colour instead of browning it, and it is also what keeps the earthy, slightly sweet character of the beetroot intact rather than cooking it into something flatter. The result is a chip that is thin, genuinely crisp and still recognisably beetroot when it hits your tongue, not a vegetable-flavoured filler.
This is the same reasoning that has pushed brands toward vacuum-cooked fruit and vegetable chips in general. The process was built for ingredients that lose too much of themselves under a traditional fryer, and beetroot is a textbook case.
The reason beetroot is so sensitive to heat in the first place comes down to its pigment. The red colour in beetroot comes from a group of compounds called betalains, and food science research has confirmed that betalains break down quickly at high temperature, which is exactly the condition standard deep frying creates. A study published in the Journal of Food Science and Technology examined vacuum frying conditions for beetroot chips and found that keeping the frying temperature in a lower range, roughly 100 to 110 degrees Celsius, preserved meaningfully more betalain content and produced a better colour outcome than higher-temperature frying. That is the underlying science behind why a vacuum-cooked beetroot chip holds its colour and a deep-fried one tends to look duller and browner by comparison.
An Ingredient With Its Own Personality
Part of what makes beetroot interesting as a chip is that it does not need much help. The natural flavour is earthy with a mild sweetness, distinctive enough that a light salt seasoning is often all it takes. Compare that to a neutral base ingredient that only comes alive once a heavy seasoning blend is added, and it is clear why product teams like working with beetroot. You are tasting the vegetable, not primarily the coating on top of it.
That matters for a category that has spent years leaning on ever bolder seasoning to create differentiation. An ingredient that brings its own flavour to the table gives a brand a genuine point of difference instead of another flavour variant competing for the same shelf space.
Why This Fits the Direction the Category Is Already Moving
Beetroot's rise on snack shelves lines up with a broader shift that has been building for a few years now: brands moving away from a single dominant base ingredient and toward a lineup built around whatever vegetable or fruit actually earns its place. Super Munchies has taken this approach with ingredients like okra and jackfruit, both chosen because the ingredient itself had a story worth telling, not because it was the easiest thing to process at scale.
Beetroot belongs in that same conversation. It brings colour that no seasoning trick can replicate, a flavour that stands on its own, and a texture that vacuum cooking is genuinely suited to handling well. For a brand looking to add something to its lineup that is different without being unfamiliar, it checks every box.
How Beetroot Compares to Other Vegetable Chips
It helps to place beetroot next to the ingredients that already have a foothold in the category. Okra brings an earthy, slightly grassy flavour and a texture that stays light rather than dense. Sweet potato leans into natural sugars that intensify under vacuum cooking, giving it a rounder, sweeter bite. Beetroot sits in its own space: an earthy flavour like okra, but with a natural sweetness closer to sweet potato, wrapped in a colour that neither of those ingredients can match. It does not compete directly with either. It fills a gap between them, which is part of why it has been easy for brands to add without cannibalising an existing flavour in the lineup.
What to Expect if You Are Trying Beetroot Chips for the First Time
If beetroot as a vegetable is not something you reach for often, the chip form is a low-effort way to find out if you like it. Expect a colour that is more vivid than the raw vegetable itself, a crunch that is clean rather than greasy when it is made through vacuum cooking, and a flavour that leans earthy with a background sweetness rather than anything sharp or bitter. It pairs well with a simple salt seasoning and does not need a heavy masala to taste like something.
If you want to try it, Super Munchies currently offers two beetroot chip flavours built around this same vacuum-cooked base: Sweet Chili Beetroot, which pairs the earthy sweetness of beetroot with a warm chili kick, and Chaat Masala Beetroot, which brings a tangy street-food seasoning to the same base. Both keep the ingredient list short and the beetroot's natural colour and flavour front and centre.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are more snack brands adding beetroot chips to their range?
Beetroot offers a distinctive colour, a flavour that stands on its own without heavy seasoning, and an ingredient story that most vegetable chip lineups have not explored yet. It gives brands a way to differentiate a shelf that had started to feel repetitive.
Do beetroot chips taste like beetroot?
When made through vacuum cooking, beetroot chips retain the earthy, mildly sweet flavour of the raw vegetable rather than cooking it into something flatter, so yes, they genuinely taste like beetroot rather than a neutral base with beetroot colouring.
How are beetroot chips different from deep-fried versions?
Deep frying beetroot at high temperature tends to dull its natural colour and push the flavour toward caramelised sugar. Vacuum cooking works at a lower temperature, which keeps both the colour and the original flavour of the beetroot intact.
Are beetroot chips a good snack option?
Vacuum-cooked beetroot chips are made from real beetroot with less oil than deep-fried snacks, and they carry a distinctive flavour that does not rely on heavy seasoning to taste good. Super Munchies makes two versions, Sweet Chili and Chaat Masala, both built on the same vacuum-cooked beetroot base.