🧂 The Blue Salt Twist — Participation in a packet
Seasoning became a choice.
🧠 UX Interpretation: Invite the user into the process
Early packets of crisps often contained a small blue paper twist filled with salt. The crisps themselves were unsalted. The eater opened the packet, unfolded the blue twist, and sprinkled salt to taste.
This simple design turned a finished product into a small ritual. The user completed the preparation. Some added all the salt. Others only a little. Children often poured the salt directly into their mouths before eating the crisps.
🎯 Theme: Interaction creates memory
The blue twist introduced a moment of agency. Eating was no longer purely passive. The eater made a decision and performed an action.
Later, manufacturers removed the twist and salted the crisps during production. The change improved efficiency and consistency. Yet something subtle disappeared. The small moment of participation vanished from the experience.
Design sometimes trades interaction for convenience.
💡 UX Takeaways
- Participation deepens engagement.
- Small rituals create lasting memories.
- User choice can exist even in simple products.
- Efficiency often replaces interaction.
- Design shapes not only use but experience.
📎 Footnote
Salt twists appeared in British crisp packets from the 1950s onward. They allowed manufacturers to ship plain crisps while letting customers control seasoning. The small blue paper sachet became a familiar feature of brands such as Smith’s before disappearing as production methods changed.
Bonus: The Search for the Salt Twist
It turns out that finding a photograph of the original crisp salt twist online is surprisingly difficult. Most modern images show small plastic sachets or foil packets, which completely miss the point. The classic version was a square of dark blue waxed paper containing a small pile of salt in the centre, with all four corners gathered together and twisted into a tiny bundle.
Midjourney proved oddly incapable of producing this simple object. Despite repeated prompt refinements, it kept generating sweet wrappers, tied candy bags, or elaborate sachets. In the end, the solution was a rather fitting piece of human-AI collaboration. By carefully describing the geometry of the paper — a square sheet, salt in the centre, all four corners twisted together into a single knot — and iteratively correcting the results, ChatGPT eventually produced an image that finally resembled the real thing.
Which feels strangely appropriate: the salt twist itself was an exercise in participation. The crisp manufacturer could easily have added the salt at the factory. Instead they invited the eater to finish the process. Even recreating its image required the same spirit of small but determined involvement.