Hot Potatoes
With designer spuds and a secret recipe, junk-food giant Frito-Lay has crunched the competition in the race to create the ultimate snack: a low-fat chip that tastes good.
(Page 3 of 3)
Every competitor knew it too, which was why they were desperately working on their own low-fat potato chips. The problem was science. While it was easier to get fat out of corn chips or pretzels, a potato chip needed to be fried in oil to have any taste at all. In one experiment, Frito-Lay’s technology department tried using vegetable oils that were lower in saturated fat, but those oils broke down when heated. Researchers then came up with a way to cook chips in a fryer and blow hot air over them to remove some of the fat. Frito-Lay was able to reduce the fat by 40 percent, but still it couldn’t develop a large enough following for the chips. Frito-Lay seemed stuck with its basic Lay’s potato chips—a one-ounce bag contained a vicious 150 calories and ten grams of fat. With the rise of tortilla chips, the potato chip market was suffering. In 1980 Lay’s represented 64 percent of Frito-Lay’s sales. In the nineties it was only 47 percent.
Then, in early 1993, Louise’s, a small company in Kentucky, came out with a product that was essentially microwaved potato chips with no fat. The taste wasn’t like a Lay’s potato chip, of course, but it wasn’t bad. Frito-Lay studies showed that consumers were interested. Suddenly, a sense of urgency was sweeping through the company.
The top-secret research endeavor was referred to only as Project Liberty—a reference to Frito-Lay’s goal of liberating the fat from a potato chip. Project Liberty was led by the company’s senior vice president of technology, Dennis Heard, a gregarious Scotsman who had received his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Edinburgh. Heard is the type who likes to wax about the potato chip the way Wordsworth once wrote about rural England. “The creation of a new potato chip,” he says, “requires a level of intellectual understanding and a degree of engineering discipline that is just as complex as building an automobile. Our goal was to find a unique structure, with a crunch so texturally satisfying and a taste that created a glorious chemical reaction between the surface sugars and starch of a potato.”
Frito-Lay’s scientists had made many breakthroughs in the past—one wall of the research department is filled with framed Frito-Lay patents, including one for a new strain of potato perfectly suited for potato chips—but the idea seemed preposterous that they could create a drastically low-fat chip that tasted like a Lay’s. In essence, they were being asked to invent an oven that worked as a fryer.
Initially, Heard had two young potato-obsessed researchers named Eve Lawson and Nancy Moriarity send sample chips through a variety of devices, from heated dryers to a specially rigged microwave to gigantic toasters. Early on, it was decided that straight slices of potatoes, which required more heat to be cooked, would not work. They needed potato flakes, a sort of flattened mashed potato, with much of the water already removed.
A small prototype oven was finally created (for proprietary reasons, Frito-Lay will not allow outsiders to see the oven), and every couple of weeks, the research team sent a “white bag” (a sample of their low-fat chips) to management for review. Even though no one could honestly say the chips were very good, Frito-Lay president Steve Reinemund, a 47-year-old ex—Marine officer who replaced Enrico after Enrico moved to a higher position with Pepsico, announced that he wanted a low-fat potato chip in a test market by 1994. The product, he said, was going to be called Baked Lay’s. Soon rumors were flying around the Potato Chip Pentagon. The new chip was going to carry the famous Lay’s name, so it had better taste good.
Heard added nearly thirty researchers to Project Liberty. A team of “flavor specialists” proposed adding a light garlic-and-onion seasoning to enhance the taste of the chip. That didn’t work. Then another team suggested using one of Frito-Lay’s specially grown potatoes with a higher sugar content. That didn’t work either.
But the scientists did make some improvements—they made the chips thinner, for example—and in August 1994 Wayne Calloway, the sometimes-hard-to-please chairman of the board of PepsiCo, flew to Dallas for a personal taste test. A white bag arrived in the Frito-Lay boardroom and Calloway opened it. As Heard remembers the moment, “Mr. Calloway took one bite and this look crossed his face. Finally he said to us, perhaps a bit sarcastically, ‘Do you really think this product deserves the Lay’s name?’”
Everyone in the room traded glances. The company was already committed to sending Baked Lay’s to the test markets that October, and here was Calloway telling them they had failed. Heard quickly gathered his team. They had to come up with a better product by Thanksgiving 1994, Heard said, “or we’re looking at a major embarrassment. My friends, the screw has been tightened.”
In charge of improving the recipe for Baked Lay’s was Frito-Lay principal scientist Tony Bello, a 37-year-old Nigerian who had received a doctorate in cereal chemistry at Texas A&M. In the processing lab, a room the size of a high school gymnasium where the scientists and engineers created their experimental ovens, Bello tried out twenty different samples (none of which he will describe because the information is considered a trade secret). He added sugar; he tried various amounts of fat; he ran a “surface response design,” in which the potato flakes were applied to the cooking sheets at various pressures.
On October 8, 1994, a particular sample came out of the oven, and a desperate Bello sunk his teeth into it. He yelped. “For me, as a food scientist, it was a eureka moment,” Bello says. “I knew we had found the right taste.”
Wayne Calloway returned in December. Another white bag was brought in. He bit into the chip, paused, and said, “Now this is a Lay’s.”
According to federal food regulations, the product is not a “chip” because it does not come from a slice of potato. Nevertheless, the new Baked Lay’s Potato Crisps were sent to the test markets in Cedar Rapids and Midland, two cities that Frito-Lay researchers say are the best reflection of mainstream America because of their incomes, ethnic mix, and average number of kids per family. The test market results were astonishing. Baked Lay’s flew off the shelves. What’s more, people weren’t sacrificing their purchases of other Frito-Lay items to buy Baked Lay’s. In total, Frito-Lay’s sales in the two cities were up by 15 to 20 percent.
In early 1995 an ecstatic Reinemund announced that he wanted to unveil Baked Lay’s nationally in time for the Super Bowl in January 1996. Frito-Lay had received massive media attention for its Super Bowl ads the last couple of years, and he thought the same sort of attention should surround Baked Lay’s. (Frito-Lay even paid to sponsor the coveted Super Bowl pre-game show.) At meetings, the marketing executives called Baked Lay’s “the snack of the century.” An advertising team from BBDO in New York began working on commercials that they prayed would out-do the hype that surrounded the Doritos commercial from the 1995 Super Bowl starring Mario Cuomo and Ann Richards. Meanwhile, Heard’s engineers worked around the clock to build four new ovens, each the size of seven eighteen-wheeler trucks, to handle Bello’s recipe.
BACK ON THE LAKE IN SORTHERN CALIFORNIA, the supermodels’ acting skills were on full display. Kathy Ireland was cracking down on her Baked Lay’s like a snapping turtle, while Naomi Campbell was learning to speak her lines with her mouth clogged with chips. Vendela showed her dexterity by bending over—in a pair of breathtakingly tiny denim shorts—and grabbing a bag of chips lying on the dock.
“Veeeeeery nice!” the director exclaimed.
In a food industry that introduces thousands of new products a year—including more than 1,300 low- and non-fat products alone in 1995—no one can say for sure whether Baked Lay’s will become America’s next great snack. With less salt than a regular Lay’s, it doesn’t have that same zing with each crunch. Some people will probably describe Baked Lay’s as less-tasty Pringles, the flat potato crisp made by Procter and Gamble that comes in a tennis ball can.
But Frito-Lay is betting that Baked Lay’s will create a revolution among consumers. In fact, believing that low-fat snacks will make up a third of its business by 1998 (as opposed to 10 or 15 percent today), the company is investing $225 million in its reduced-fat products, building new factories in three states and adding fifteen manufacturing lines to existing plants. Frito-Lay’s competitors seem helpless against such an onslaught. In late October Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Eagle Snacks, the country’s second largest snack food company, announced that Eagle Snacks was up for sale because of poor earnings.
As long as Americans snack—and in the nineties snacking has become a fourth meal, the source of 25 percent of our calories—Frito-Lay will keep churning out the chips. Each day, the executives will arrive in their casual clothes at their elegant headquarters in Plano with more plans for capturing more share of stomach. And if Baked Lay’s never catches on? “Do not worry,” Dennis Heard says. “We are working on more than thirty new snacks. You will never escape us.”
My Library
