PepsiCo Cuts Chip Prices After Losing Over $1 Billion in Revenue
https://eurweb.com/pepsico-chip-price-cuts-revenue-loss/Open linkView original on lemmy.world443
Comments114https://eurweb.com/pepsico-chip-price-cuts-revenue-loss/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
Thankfully that doesn't apply to PepsiCo, because 90% of their snacks are the most mid shit on that shelf coasting off brand recognition and shelf space. If I want cheap, I get generic; if I want great taste, I get some other brand. If I want somewhere in the middle, I get Utz. If I want medium–high cost for medium–low-quality flavor and texture, I buy a PepsiCo product. And if I want to make the right choice, I don't get any of those.
The only thing keeping them afloat is pure market penetration- it's hard to not maintain volume when you're the only one on the shelf of every mini mart.
Heh penetration
My favorite chips are store brand. Whatever store. They taste better and are cheaper. This started with Blue Bell BBQ chips. Long gone, but so good.
that was some salty snack of a roller-coaster.
Great taste? Lol. K.
oh, no! looks like all that greedy shrinkflation blew up in your greedy faces! boohoo!
Every time I get in my hands a bag of 110g Doritos, I simply laugh and put it back.
What kind of consumer would be won over by smaller sizes? Savvy consumers know the best deals usually come from the larger sizes, which tend to have a lower price by weight. Or are they seriously trying to frame shrinkflation as somehow being for a customer's benefit?
Yeah they are attempting to frame it that way. Here'd the logic in their muddled heads.
"We've increased the price of a 250g pack to £2 and people have stopped buying, so we'll reduce the price to £1.50"
"Yeah but you reduced the size to 100g"
"But the price !!!" Waves hands confusedly.
"Well, at least you'll have a side dish to eat shit with"
In the age of MBAs, I would bet on that 9 times out of 10.
Like if I'm going to pay $9 Canadian for my chips anyway, I might as well buy the locally made brand or other premium chip.
If you've found one, do you have any leads on a Canadian brand that makes good All-Dressed chips? I'd definitely pick them on my next trip north.
My rec is Hardbite Chips.
*But honestly try any Canadian product you see available.
I don't think Old Dutch is a Canadian brand. Their headquarters are in MN.
Oh yeah you may be right. They have a way larger presence here so my impression was it's Canadian, let me fix that.
Minnesotans are as about as close as you can get to a Canadian so...
Hardbite is the best option in Canada, no contest. The prices are quite fair too given the current market.
Awesome! These look like they're available local to me only a couple miles away here on the wrong side of the border.
I used to only buy name brand snacks. I like the consistency, and I can afford it, so I'd spend the extra few cents. And honestly I just didn't even pay attention to the price.
But $6 for a bag of Cheetos? I can still afford that, but I won't because fuck them. I'm buying store brand for life now. If they put the price lower than it was before and fire someone for being so disrespectful to their customers, I'll give them another shot, but that's not going to happen.
I've not yet found a single good store brand here in Estonia.
I have however resorted to eating significantly less of that shit and preferring Taffel (Finnish), Estrella (part of German company Intersnack) or Balsnack (Estonian) when I do.
I enjoy a ball snack once in a while myself.
Can't even count to ten without kaks teist...
Wait, how do YOU count to ten because for me twelve comes a bit after ten lol
I swear to God that I had originally read that as "Ballsack", and I was all geared up to write a response about "Eating Ballsack".
They tried to win consumers by shrinkflation? Oh fuck them.
shrinkflation and greedflation. or a combination with Cheapflation, although this is more common with hygiene/cleaning supplies products.
wait what? I was with you til the cheapflation, fill me in, what gross thing don't I know yet?
When I initially readthe headline I was very confused because I hadn't been aware Pepisco had become a semiconductor manufacturer.
The best flavors are made in Taiwan
Using Extreme Ultraviolet lithography!
for each chip
See! Everyone has been saying AI is inflating chip prices! Not so!
/wait, what?
“We’ve spent the past year listening closely to consumers, and they’ve told us they’re feeling the strain,” said Rachel Ferdinando, CEO of PepsiCo Foods U.S. “Lowering the suggested retail price reflects our commitment to help reduce the pressure where we can. Because people shouldn’t have to choose between great taste and staying within their budget.”
What a fucking liar. They spent the last couple of years trying to find ANY other solution besides lowering prices, and now they are lowering them AFTER losing a billion bucks, and trying to frame it as trying to help their customers. No they aren't, the bleeding has gotten so bad that they are now in a blind panic.
I stopped buying their overpriced crap long ago. At Aldi, you can get a decent sized bag of the best kettle-cooked chips I've ever eaten for less than $2. A tiny bag of Lays, 20% of the size of an Aldi bag, is $3 or more. Pepsico can go fuck themselves with their predatory prices.
As much as I will always have a purple shaped hole in my heart for the sweet chili flavor, I'm totally cool not ever eating them again. Every big company can suck my shriveled excuse for a phallice. I have seen that they will destroy anything and everything around them for a few extra hundredths of a percentage point in share prices.
Side note, homemade tortilla chips with a little sprinkle of a ranch seasoning packet+cayenne>>>Doritos cool ranch.
I'm never buying Lays chips again, I haven't for over a year now. Never going back, they never needed to raise their price that much, greedy greedy greedy. They took the corpo idea of 'never leaving money on the table' and thought they could gouge us. They thought of us as stupid 'cattle' that would cower to their decades old brand. Fuck brand loyalty. Same thing for McDonalds, I haven't been back there in over 4 years and I'm NEVER going back. NEVER.
Yup. Once the routine is broken it’s broken. Living life without some stuff is actually easy and they have lost a customer for life.
I’ve boycotted a few brands in the last 3/4 years, and I expected to miss them more. But in honestly I feel proud at my resolve and now I just think urghhh I don’t need that crap. If I feel an urge I’ll get a no brand. Used to visit maccas fortnightly. Lucky is it’s once a year. I’ve been buying Mexican or European cola…if I have to have it.
Right there with you on McDonald's! I used to get a hot and spicy McChicken at least once every other week as a snack while running around. But after the staged bs with trump (not) serving all of 5 very obvious plants, they will not see another red cent from me!
I like this idea, and I could think of a lot of interesting spice combos to use. I'm already partial to garlic and rosemary on fries in the air fryer, that would be great on tortilla chips.
Do you fry them, bake them, what? Will they work in the air fryer?
Basic pot with corn oil. The tortillas themselves are incredibly cheap when you buy the packages, I cut them into sixths instead of quarters to feel fancy.
Yeah, I'd do 6ths, too.
So I really hate deep frying. What do you do with the leftover oil?
Dunno who downvotes an honest question, but I got you back on the better side of zero.
Suffice to say most people will call me dirty, but I leave it as is most times. If I'm desperate and/or lazy and didn't want to go to the store for more and it's starting to taste funky, I ghetto clarify it with a 1:3 mix of cornstarch and milk respectively.
Start with one drop off water from your finger in the cold oil and when you hear it start to bubble, kill the heat and add one more drop off water. When you hear it popping once every half second or so add a small amount of the milk cornstarch mix and stir vigorously. Strain through first a course sift then a fine one. The proteins in the milk and cornstarch will bind with all the nastiness and make the particles big enough to be caught by the filters and give you almost brand new oil assuming you don't deep fry at 400+degrees.
Translation: "YOY revenue is down and we fucked the consumer too hard, and this drop of lube in the form of coupons that steal your data didn't seem to make them enjoy it more. Let's try and recover shareholder value by dong the unthinkable....gulp lowering prices by a tiny bit"
The CEO talks about their products like the McDonalds CEO.
holds bag of Doritos I just want you to know, I will be having this for my snack.
To be fair, it's more accurate to call chips product
Oh no poor people are our biggest market. How else will people in food deserts get their calories.
I love a good news day.
$7 bag?!
for a small bag, even some at WF sells 7oz bags for way less.
The article doesn’t mention it, but at least here in Europe, one big issue is that they changed all their products to be tasteless.
Because of the ‘healthy foods’ grading we have here, they took out a lot of what made their chips tasty. Resulting in very bland products. We personally haven’t bought any of those brands for a few years now because of it. Because I don’t want a ‘healthy’ chip - I want a tasty snack.
It’s definitely noticeable in Dutch supermarkets that many people are ditching those brands because of the lack of taste. And the price increases just accelerate that.
Can you mention specific regulation? I'm not sure what you're saying is correct
In the Netherlands and a few other countries we have the Nutri-Score
https://www.rivm.nl/en/food-and-nutrition/nutri-score
This ranks a food from A (best) to E (worst) based on how well it fits into the dietary guidelines.
Important thing to note: it’s a ranking that compares foods in that same group. So it’s not ‘vegetables are A, pizza is E’, but rather ‘this Doritos has less salt than this bag of Lay’s’.
Now, this effectively caused companies to make their products blander in order to avoid a worse score. It also happened to save them money - you use fewer ingredients.
End result: chips now appear healthier because they have a better score… while also tasting like cardboard.
And how did that go over with consumers? See article. And you can read numerous complaints about it on social media.
Ironically, this also means that the Nutri-Score sorta works. Why eat chips when they are tasteless? 😂
Alright, I thought you were saying evil EU laws make our food suck but it's actually good old corporate decisions to maximize profit. I'm Dutch as well so I know about nutriscore. I don't see that clear line between an advisory traffic light system on packaging and Lay's making potato chips worse than they already were. It's up to Lay's, don't blame the nutriscore.
I bet it will become like the Parental Guidance symbol. People will buy products with a low Nutri-Score because that (for junk food) symbolises quality.
I remember one chef giving the very specific critique that America doesn’t add nearly enough salt to its foods. Seems that’s a very tense cultural thing.
I think that chef might have had a sodium deficiency
Wow something we’re actually getting right here. How salty things taste to you adjusts over time depending on what your normal level is. And salt is super bad for you.
Yeh. Feel that. I hate it. However it’s helped me stop and get over them.
There is a Frito-Lay factory in my home town. It absolutely stinks. At certain times of the year, it’s worse and the odor just lingers in the air.
What is the smell if you don't mind me asking?
I like that someone downvoted you for that innocent question lmao
and so politely, too
I assume it was an accident? Dunno for sure. Lemmy can be touchy at times.
The one near me just kinda smells like a McDonalds, it does mostly potato chips
It’s grease and rotting potato skins, but not like French fries. I haven’t live there in a very long time, but from accounts of friends and family, the smell hasn’t gone away at all.
From all accounts, it’s a pretty fucking terrible place to work too.
I’m a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week
Lawsuit alleges culture of racial harassment, discrimination at Topeka Frito-Lay plant
Frito-Lay had workers move the dead body of a coworker and keep working, claims striking employee
Frito-Lay pledges to reduce smell problem around Topeka plant.
I notice all the brand name chips are $6-8 but the off brands and Walmart brands are like $2-3…
It's just pure greed, plainly blatant.
I still buy Tostitos, but only when they are run their "Buy 4 or More for $1.99 Each" sale or something similar. They're stupidly expensive otherwise.
Oh, my friend, let me tell you.
The tortilla chips that are in a paper bag taste so much better than Tostitos. And they are SO much cheaper. You can get 2-3 bags of the paper bag tortilla chips for the cost of that one bag of Tostitos, and you'll like them more.
I like those too, but they're a different thing IMO.
same for WF, used to be target, but they started enshittifying themselves a few years ago.
For what size?? I see brand-name prices from $4-5 Canadian for a 200g bag and that is expensive as hell. Store brand chips are $1.50 to $2. $2.50 generic brand at expensive chains and corner stores.
some stores are $5/200g bag for name brand around me in Ontario, some are up to $8 for name brand. not a gas station
even Costco has reduced the size of their giant $8 bags by 100g or so in the past two years
Yup quit buying their stuff a while back. Insane prices and less product. Only a clueless idiot would think that would attract customers.
Watching the prices go up and up while bags got smaller and smaller and smaller was infuriating.
'Normal' sized bags now are almost all under 200g now.
'Family size' are smaller than the old Normal sized bags
I mostly buy store brand chips which remained reasonably priced now.
I didn’t want to believe it but the SNAP cuts really seemed to have a positive effect on prices. SNAP should be a tax break, not literally money in peoples pockets.
Except that's absurd.
A lot of people without income don't actually file taxes.
Your proposal just means the people who need it most would get jack squat and the people who itemize(who tend to have the most) would get the vast majority of the benefits.
Do you even understand taxes? Why would a person who earns enough money qualify for snap? When you inject money into the economy it creates inflation which is why a bag of Fritos was over $7. My example was one of countless ways to make sure the people who need snap get benefits. There is more than one way to skin a cat and don’t claim to have all the answers but to act like the way snap benefits were dispersed didnt have adverse effects on the economy is delusional at this point.
You aren't wrong that putting money into the economy raises inflation. However, the inflation from SNAP disbursements is inconsequential compared to stuff like putting tariffs on everything or allowing corpos to raise prices out of pure greed. There's really no point in examining SNAP's effect on inflation when there are much more consequential concerns to focus on.
That’s absolutely true. Im not insinuating that snap was the reason inflation was high. However the cuts to snap absolutely had an affect on the prices of certain things. Soda and chips were the most obvious. I don’t have a problem with snap as an idea. However the way it’s implemented is stupid. Not to mention it does nothing the solve the issue. Instead of giving money to corporations (which is basically what snap does) the government should be forcing them to pay livable wages or be creating affordable housing so people don’t need to choose between food and rent.
Someone has never gone hungry or skipped a meal to feed a child....
I’ve been on snap before. I’ve also skipped many meals. It is a shit program that is poorly distributed and disproportionately benefits people that abuse it.
If it even helped one person than that’s great but all you sjw’s that want to defend the honor of SNAP is insane.
I’d rather my tax dollars go to food that is being “abused” than whatever the fuck else the government is spending money on.
The problem with that is, if it isn't required to go to food, it often won't. That doesn't just impact the parents. It also impacts the kids.
Nah, UBI should be given to everybody. It would boost the economy and allow people to buy basic things without worrying about starving to death.
I don't think this has anything to do with snap. Folks on snap don't have a blank check and are still cost conscious. If anything more so. Thats why the article is about how they saw a tipping point where a massive amount of consumers stopped buying their name brands and generics saw a big uptick.
I’ve got the solution! Smaller chips, more air in the bag.
The ceo grudgingly agreed to hold off on his 15 million dollar bonus for a few years so that they can lower the prices.
Unrealistic fiction. You have to make your characters more believable. Ex: The ceo begrudgingly thought about someone besides a shareholder for approximately 3 seconds, farted, then signed an agreement to kill another grandmother.
Artificial movement on the supply or demand curves will typically work back toward equilibrium...
Look who found the near side of the total cost curve.
Why would anyone buy Lays when Utz exists, is cheaper, and better?
Until fairly recently, Utz wasn't available in a large part of the country.
It is now, though, thankfully.
And I know exactly what you mean. Utz chips are definitely better.
I do wish the crab flavor was more available outside of the Central Atlantic region.
Walmart has the Crab Chips in 1oz. vending bags, 60ct for about $17. Cheaper than buying from the Utz website. I've bought them for years, never got a short dated box or anything. Only thing I'll buy from Walmart.
Not to mention a lot of store brand chips are great too at a couple bucks a bag. Can't justify 7$ for a sm bag of fritos especially if I sit there and put the whole bag in me in one sitting.
Too bad. I've learned my lesson and won't be giving you business my money again.
My local grocery store brand has a similar or better alternative anyway, and always cheaper.
Like I'd ever willingly buy an American product.
Good?
Eat more cheaper fresh whole foods!
Or Great Value potato chips!
Everybody is a commerce genius until things hit three comma losses.
Tres comas babyyh (don’t mention the negative sign doe)
Why are adults still eating this crap? It’s going to cost you $6 now (including price drop) and thousands+ more because of health issues it’ll create in the future.
Best thing inflation did was force me to learn how to bulk cook. I do take out and eat junk food a handful of times per year. My wallet is happy, and my bloodwork is looking good too.
Because it's a mix of sweet and salty, which scratches our instinctual desires.
It has been a hobby and a passion for hundreds of millions of people going on 10,000 years.
Retvrn 2 Tradition
And fat. Sweet, salty, carbs, fat. Ding, ding, ding!
I'm trying to lower my blood pressure, and cutting back on sodium isn't really a problem for me — cause I'm probably already under 2G a day (I rarely eat processed/junk food, and I only use the bare minimum of salt)
Now smoking, drinking, lack of exercise, and (unhealthy levels of) stress... that's what's killing me, literally. But at least my salt game is chill
Truth. Really. Don't eat garbage.
No surprise here. Their shit is overpriced and not in any meaningful way better than most competitors. Yeah there are some things like Fritos that are pretty unique, but potato chips are a dime a dozen and you can honestly get much better potato chips from other brands.
Their chips kinda suck ass though
I have so many local brands over here, I don't worry buying PepsiCo.
Toooooo late dipshits.
So they just blatantly admitted their price are batshit crazy and they could just lower them at any point of time, right?
Yes, I know we all knew, but usually they're all about "increase costs" and other BS. So glad that for once they just said they could just lower the price. I guess they still have a comfortable margin there…
Hopefully now you'll get what you pay for: air.
Fukin garbage. Everything they make is poison.
It would be great news if people were eating less of this crap.
But no. They are eating no-name crap instead.
Still poisonous trash.