Two major industry awards in the same cycle have put Uglies Kettle Chips and its Sweet Potato Chip portfolio in the spotlight heading into the final quarter of 2026. The upcycled snack brand, a division of Dieffenbach's Snacks, earned a 2026 Best New Product Award from Convenience Store News for its 1.5 oz. Hot Honey Sweet Potato Chips, while the broader Sweet Potato lineup — Original, Hot Honey, and Spicy BBQ — captured a Double Gold Award for Taste and Package Design in the Food & Beverage Magazine Summer CPG Awards.
What the Awards Cover
The Convenience Store News honor specifically calls out the 1.5 oz. format, which was engineered for c-stores, travel centers, and grab-and-go retail — a channel where single-serve impulse items continue to drive snack sales. The Double Gold recognition covers both sensory performance and shelf presence across all three Sweet Potato SKUs, a combined endorsement that retail buyers and foodservice operators increasingly weigh when evaluating emerging snack brands for placement.
"These awards validate everything we set out to achieve with our Sweet Potato Chip platform," said Jim Biondolillo, SVP Sales & Marketing at Uglies. "We wanted to create a delicious snack consumers could feel good about purchasing. Recognition for both innovation and product excellence shows that great taste and positive impact can go hand-in-hand."
The Upcycled Sourcing Story
Uglies builds its supply chain around cosmetically imperfect sweet potatoes that would otherwise be discarded before reaching market. The brand holds Upcycled Certified™ status, and since its founding in 2017 it has helped divert more than 38 million pounds of potatoes from food waste — a sourcing narrative that resonates with sustainability-minded retail and foodservice buyers evaluating better-for-you snack options for their assortments.
The Hot Honey variety pairs the natural sweetness of sweet potato with a honey-and-heat balance that tracks with one of the more durable flavor trends across restaurant menus and packaged snacks in recent years. That flavor credibility, now backed by third-party award recognition, gives retail and foodservice buyers a validation point beyond the brand's own marketing claims.
For operators and buyers sourcing snack SKUs for hospitality grab-and-go programs, hotel markets, or convenience-forward foodservice environments, the dual recognition offers a practical signal: a compact, differentiated product with documented retail traction and a story that connects to food-waste reduction goals many hospitality groups have embedded in their sourcing commitments.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
