Much has been made of the recent news that the makers of Doritos, the crunchy, salty, finger-stainy snack, have decided that what the world needs right now, what it really, truly needs to solve all of the injustice, inequality, terrorism and nuclear threats that have become daily life is special snacks for ladies. They poured resources into research in an attempt to rectify an issue that we are all aware of but are too ashamed as a society to discuss. That we women loooooove to snack, (especially on Doritos, obvs!) but we are too embarrassed to eat in public on account of the loud crunch that the snacks make. Also, the Doritos people helpfully discovered that as a gender, we miss out on getting the good, powdery orange dust at the bottom of the bag (assuming we were able to locate a silencer to strap to our faces while eating so that we could even eat the thunderously loud intact Doritos to begin with) because we wouldn’t be caught dead licking it off our fingers in public.
Imagine my delight when I learned that corporate America had finally solved one of the top ten biggest issues facing women today by inventing a snack that reduced crunch volume noticeably while also cleverly creating a snack bag that could fit easily into women’s purses. Because we all carry dainty purses. Clearly they did not consult me or ask to see my purse which is well stocked enough to see me and the kids through a 36 hour hurricane and also give me a decent chance of winning something on the game show Let’s Make a Deal. (Google it if you’re too young or too foreign to know what that is).
I’m not sure if Indra Nyooi, longtime president of PepsiCo, the company that owns Doritos and the person who announced this initiative, had been locked in a bunker for 15 years, but I’d like to give her the benefit of the doubt because there’s no other way to explain how, in 2018, anyone could display such a lack of understanding of women’s concerns and goals. I wish I could get my hands on the footage of the focus groups that were run to come to the conclusion that they could increase Doritos sales to women exponentially by simply making them quieter. More importantly, however, I’d like to know if this snack-silencing technology they’ve invented can somehow be applied to, say…….children? Moms would buy that like crazy. You’re welcome, PepsiCo.
By now the product launch has been scrapped and the only enjoyment we will get out of lady Doritos will be via endless memes and spoof videos. All that money spent on research into how to silence a chip goes right down the toilet (unlike my kids’ pee which seems to make it only to the general vicinity of the toilet. Yes, I need to mention pee in every single post).
Indra, I sincerely hope that you are reading this because I’m about to save your ass. Women don’t need silent snacks, but you know who does? KIDS.
It feels like only yesterday that I was 14 years old sitting in 9th grade bio, starving to death and after contorting myself like a Cirque du Soleil performer to reach under my chair into my bag to get a stealth handful of potato chips and then let my head linger near the floor long enough to stuff a few in my mouth, I was still faced with the problem of how to chew without getting caught by the teacher. The only solution was to suck on each individual chip until it became soft enough to silently chew and swallow. A totally unsatisfying experience without the crunching and subsequent voracious finger licking (instead i had to furtively wipe my hands on my denim skirt) and while it saved me from death by starvation, it was still, at the end of the day, me just eating soggy, water-logged chips. Gross.
Where were you THEN, silent lady Doritos?? You’ve got the right product but the wrong target market. Kids would flock to the store in droves to get their hands on a snack that hid any evidence of their snacking from teachers, parents, security guards who work at Zara. I can hear my kids chewing something crunchy from across the house, from three floors up, from the next zip code. They say when you lose one sense, the others sharpen. I guess when I stopped working to raise my family , the instant gratification of receiving praise for completing projects and meeting deadlines at work was replaced with other useful skills like 360 degree vision and bionic hearing. If my kids could get a snack that I couldn’t hear them eating, they’d be stockpiling it and burying it in the backyard, perhaps in the same bunker that the PepsiCo president formerly occupied.
So come on, PepsiCo, don’t be quitters. Pull yourselves up by the bootstraps and rebrand! Advertise on Snapchat, Disney Channel and YouTube, where the kids hang out. Slap a sticker over the LadySnack logo on each package that says something like “StealthSnacks” or “Kids:1-Parents:0” or whatever your new marketing director (assuming the old one is gone) comes up with.
No need to thank me. Although a 2% royalty on each bag sold would be a nice gesture.
The Mom Who Knew Too Much 