Doritos at $7 a bag ended up costing PepsiCo billions
detroitnews.com
detroitnews.com
> PepsiCo Inc.’s chips prices had gotten too high. Walmart Inc. had been telling the maker of Doritos, Lay’s, Cheetos and many other beloved snacks that was the case for more than a year.
> Executives at PepsiCo knew it, too. Sales at Frito-Lay, the company’s snacks powerhouse, were plunging. Some of its chips cost more than $7 a bag; at Walmart, Doritos prices had jumped nearly 50% from 2021, according to Attain, which tracks consumer spending data.
> Yet, even when Walmart cut Frito-Lay’s shelf . space — giving it to its own cheaper, in-house brand and competitors like Takis — price tags didn’t go down. Finally, in February PepsiCo announced it would slash prices by up to 15% on some salty snacks. By then, Frito-Lay had missed internal revenue targets for two years in a row by over $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.