Ladies will still have to battle other injustices in life, but at least PepsiCo has got them covered on the equal-snacking front: According to an interview CEO Indra Nooyi gave to Freakonomics, the company behind Doritos, Fritos, Tostitos, Cheetos, Ruffles, and Lays is in the process of developing chips it can market specifically to women. Nooyi believes that women will love these “chips for her” because they’ll be able to eat them without looking like their male snack-eating counterparts.
This is how dudes consume their chips, Nooyi says:
As you watch a lot of the young guys eat the chips, they love their Doritos, and they lick their fingers with great glee, and when they reach the bottom of the bag they pour the little broken pieces into their mouth, because they don’t want to lose that taste.
By contrast, ladies either can’t or won’t:
Women I think would love to do the same, but they don’t. They don’t like to crunch too loudly in public. And they don’t lick their fingers generously and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth.
Without saying more about what these women-centric products might entail, Nooyi tells Freakonomics that PepsiCo is “getting ready to launch a bunch of them soon.” It does sound like they won’t be just chips, but all kinds of snacks that are “low-crunch,” yet have a “full taste profile,” and hopefully less of the “flavor stick on the fingers” situation. Their aim is also for things that are purse-friendlier.
After reports of the snack’s development started to spread, though, Frito-Lay wanted to make it clear that it is not developing “Doritos for women.”
Instead, a company rep tells the Times, “The reporting on a specific Doritos product for female consumers is inaccurate,” although the company isn’t yet ready to elaborate “beyond what Indra relayed in the podcast.” So, they won’t be Doritos, but they will be … something.
This post has been updated with Frito-Lay’s response following the initial wave of stories.
