Unchained in America

The marketers and brand managers at Frito-Lay just don’t seem to get it.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve noticed that one or more people from PepsiCo in Plano, Texas have been visiting at my blog. Lisa and I are thrilled that people at PepsiCo have noticed us.

Then I saw that a few of the visitors came from a blog by Mandy Lozano. Lozano is a 2009 graduate of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and now works at Frito-Lay in brand management. In her blog post, Lozano waxes enthusiastically about a presentation on the “Lay’s Local” ad campaign that Dave Skena, VP of Marketing at Frito-Lay, gave on September 26th at the Darden Marketing Forum.

Lozano thinks that Skena’s presentation “knocked it out of the park.” Seeing how the videos of Lay’s “local” industrial farmers moved the audience, she says, “warmed [her] little heart.” And in an aside, she mentions my “jaded” view of the “Lay’s Local” campaign and how my heart isn’t “warm-able” [sic]. Lozano thinks I didn’t do my research because the Frito-Lay operations are “highly-localized” [sic]. Perhaps she didn’t read my post on Part 3 of the “Lay’s Local” campaign carefully enough.

I agree with Lozano that the Lay’s® Potato Chips operations are highly localized because the potatoes are processed into chips in plants near the potato farms. But almost every potato chip company turns its potatoes into chips at processing plants near their potato farms. After all, most potato chips are locally made.

But being locally made doesn’t necessarily make potato chips local.

Are Lay’s Potato Chips Local?

Let’s go over the criteria again that distinguishes Lay’s Potato Chips from locally produced food:

Criterion for Being Considered a Local Food	Lay’s Potato Chips
The food is grown on small, family-style farms.	No — Frito-Lay’s potatoes are grown on local farms, but most of those farms are large, industrial farms. Some farmers own land in more than one state, and even in a foreign country to grow potatoes.
The farmers create a small carbon footprint.	No — Frito-Lay’s industrial farmers create a large carbon footprint because of the heavy machinery they use.
The food is processed in local plants.	Yes — except at peak times, when the processing plant can’t handle the huge amounts of potatoes. Then some potatoes are diverted to other, non-local plants for processing. Frito-Lay also owns the processing plants, so the plants aren’t locally owned. The profits made by the plants go to Frito-Lay, not the local community.
The money spent on the chips stays in the community in which those chips were bought. The profits also stay in the community.	No — money from selling the Lay’s Potato Chips wholesale goes to corporate headquarters in Plano, Texas.
Both seller and buyer consider each other as citizens of a local community.	No — Frito-Lay marketers and brand managers consider the buyers as faceless consumers whose role in life is to buy Frito-Lay salty snack foods. Frito-Lay isn’t a citizen of the local community, except in Plano, Texas.

Citizens vs. Consumers

An important distinction between local food and Lay’s Potato Chips is the role of the buyer. With local food, both the buyer and the seller consider themselves as citizens — that is, members of a local community. One goal of the local food movement is to emphasize the importance of local merchants and local shoppers to the vitality of a city or town. Another goal is to emphasize the personal relationship between merchant and shopper.

Local merchants are interested in their community. Local merchants tend to donate more to local causes than chain stores or global conglomerates such as PepsiCo and its snack food division, Frito-Lay. Local merchants also are more interested in what’s happening in their community and are even willing to pay more in taxes if doing that will benefit their community. Local merchants know the people who shop in their stores, and the shoppers know the merchants.

The marketers and brand managers at Frito-Lay see the people who buy their products as consumers — not as citizens of local communities. The consumers’ role is to buy Frito-Lay’s salty snack foods to drive up Frito-Lay’s profits for PepsiCo.

For information on how people came to be viewed as consumers, see my post How Chain Stores Turned Us into Consumers.

See also:

• The Truth about Frito-Lay’s “Lay’s Local” Marketing Campaign — Part 1
• The Truth about Frito-Lay’s “Lay’s Local” Marketing Campaign — Part2
• The Truth about Frito-Lay’s “Lay’s Local” Marketing Campaign — Part 3
• The Truth about Frito-Lay’s “Lay’s Local Marketing Campaign — Part 4: Frito-Lay’s Dirty Little Secret

Tags: Frio-Lay, Lay's Local, Lay's Potato Chips, local food, potato chips

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 10:46 am and is filed under PR & Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.