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Women have long been calling for more affordable feminine hygiene products, birth control, equal pay and an end to sexual harassment – and to prove our voices are always heard, we’ve been offered Lady Doritos: Doritos with a less-audible crunch, for ladies.
Well, hold up because despite what you may have seen elsewhere the different ways men and women eat chips is just one of the things PepsiCo CEO, Indra Nooyi, discussed in a recent episode of the popular podcast Freakonomics Radio.
Indra Nooyi is one of the only women in the world to run a company the size of PepsiCo, and she’s been remarkably successful in the role. She shares a bit of her challenging mission in the top position during a financial crisis.
“I knew this journey was going to be long, arduous, and it was going to be filled with pitfalls,” Indra explains to podcast host Stephen Dubner.
“We had to change the culture of this company.”
PepsiCo CEO, Indra Nooyi
Indra became CEO when a major culture shift towards wellness took hold, what could you do with a brand whose best selling products are all now seen as evil?
This was when the company instated “Fun for You,” “Better for You,” and “Good for You” categories.
The “Fun for You” sections contains all the brands most iconic products like Pepsi and Doritos.
Other things the CEO of PepsiCo discusses are the importance of STEM in education and growing up India. However, that was all lost after Dubner asked Indra,” I understand that men and women eat chips very differently. Can you tell us the differences?”
Her answer has outraged both men and women around the world.
“When you eat out of a flex bag — one of our single-serve bags — especially 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 of the flavor, and the broken chips in the bottom,” she explains.
“Women 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.”
“It’s not a male and female as much as ‘are there snacks for women that can be designed and packaged differently?’ And yes, we are looking at it, and we’re getting ready to launch a bunch of them soon.”
“For women, low-crunch, the full taste profile, not have so much of the flavor stick on the fingers, and how can you put it in a purse? Because women love to carry a snack in their purse.”
People on Twitter are outraged at the assumption women want a quiet chip.
Beside the fact that the idea of a “lady Dorito” sounds like it was developed by someone who studied advertising in 1952, I think quiet, purse sized chips sound wonderful.
Yes it’s wrong to assume that only women want a less messy, less noisy chip while men are left to be as messy and noisy as the like both in public and at home.
And perhaps if we gave them a label which sounds less like someone politely describing a women’s breasts and made a move to market them towards places like open plan offices, movie theaters and midnight bed snacking (is that just me) … we could be looking at the launch of one of the greatest products of all time.
Here’s to a future filled with quiet chips for everyone.
