I wanna save the Earth but, not if its gonna be noisy

Talk to those tree hugging Dirt Firsters and they will tell you that there is no price too high to pay for saving the planet; Skyrocketing energy prices, they're cool with that, raising disease rates to eliminate pesticides, way OK dude but, when their bag of chips crinkles too much, well, that's another story...

Sun Chips Bag to Lose Its Crunch

Frito-Lay, the snack giant owned by PepsiCo Inc., says it is pulling most of the biodegradable packaging it uses for its Sun Chips snacks, following an outcry from consumers who complained the new bags were too noisy.

Touted by Frito-Lay as 100% compostable, the packaging, made from biodegradable plant material, began hitting store shelves in January. Sales of the multigrain snack have since tumbled.

Frito-Lay is returning to its old, nondegradable packaging, for five of the six Sun Chips flavors. It will continue to use the noisy packaging for its Sun Chips Original brand. It has been working on trying to find a quieter version of the packaging since it first introduced the new bags - a process that is continuing.

"We chose to respond to the consumer feedback but still want to show that we are committed" to compostable packaging, says Chris Kuechenmeister, a spokesman for Frito-Lay.

Consumers have posted videos on the Web poking fun at the new bags and lodged fierce complaints on social-networking sites. Since January, year-on-year sales of Sun Chips have decreased each month.

Wall Street Journal




I guess there's a line that even the enviro-wackos won't cross and Sun Chips has found it.

haha,seriously?

Guess some people don't like making a noise when they're trying to sneak in a pack on sun chips.Totally ridiculous

Revolution!

as long as it doesn't inconvenience anyone that is. Is it okay to change the world now? Everybody okay with the decibel level of our protestations? The colors of the new flag alright? I'm not offending the color-blond am I?

Humanity is just wonderful but good god do I hate people.

why do people have to bitch and moan about everything so mundane as this..."WAAAH MY BAG OF CHIPS IS TOO LOUD"...it's crybaby consumers like this that make life for many businesses a pain in the arse...I can understand complaining about real problems with products...but the bag being "too loud" give me a break people

I guess the idea of pouring the chips into a bowl and eating them that way never crossed any-body's mind?


Nah, that would make sense.

Will they bring the price back down? Thats the reason my family stopped buying them.

Anyone that uses the word "vlog" in a sentence deserves to be annoyed as much as is humanly possible.
I vote that we all go stand outside his house and eat from noisy bags while playing xylophones

reply to post by FortAnthem


I think people should be more worried about the effects of highly-processed snackfood products on their health, rather than the sound that the packaging makes.

You think only tree-huggers buy those chips?

I guarantee you, the "tree-huggers" were not the ones to complain about this.

What would of happened is PepsiCo (a multinational corporation) would of had a focus-group and said "how can we make this product better" and some idiot would of said "make the packet quiet"

It has nothing to do with environmentalists - and probably has everything to do with PepsiCo trying to save money.

What about the noise made when you actual eat the chips? That could be quite disturbing also. Perhaps the chips should be made softer?

On a more serious note, I strongly doubt that such a large MNC would introduce a new packaging material and not put it through Research. The sound issue would surely have been discovered well before any product hit the shelves.

Might this not be a cop-out, so that the company can go back to the packaging used previously (which I would imagine is cheaper to produce)?

UPDATE

After spending an undisclosed amount of money (they're probably embarrassed to admit how much it cost), Frito Lay has solved the problem. By putting rubber between the layers.

Frito-Lay hopes new SunChips bag quiets critics

The company introduced a biodegradable bag for the snacks in April of 2009 with a big marketing effort to play up its environmentally friendly nature as it was made from plants and not plastic and could break down in compost.

However, customers complained the bag was too loud. The stiffer material made it give off noise of that, measured in decibels, is about as loud as a busy city street. The criticism grew so deafening that the company switched back to its original bag for most flavors in October.

The company found that if it used a different adhesive to put together the two layers of a bag — one which protects the food on the inside and one which carries the logo and labels on the outside — it created a sort of noise barrier.

Rodgers said engineers looked at dozens of possible options. He admitted that he was initially suspect of the theory that the razor-thin layer of adhesive would solve such a big problem. But engineers found that a more rubber-like adhesive really did absorb some of the sound.

The company's first design gave off noise that registered at roughly 80 to 85 decibels. The new design dampens the noise to around 70 decibels, on par with its original packaging and most other chip bags.

AP News Story


I woner if adding the layer of rubbery adhesive is gonna make it less biodegradable?

Originally posted by FortAnthem

Talk to those tree hugging Dirt Firsters and they will tell you that there is no price too high to pay for saving the planet; Skyrocketing energy prices, they're cool with that, raising disease rates to eliminate pesticides, way OK dude but, when their bag of chips crinkles too much, well, that's another story...

You make the flying leap of assumption that it's, ahem, "dirt firsters" who are raising a stink about the bags. Of course, you have no evidence of this.

Are you basing your argument off some supposition like, I dunno, environmental rapists and the apathetic masses who love them never eat sun chips?

reply to post by FortAnthem


The guy in the video won't last one day in
a SHTF scenario....

reply to post by TheWalkingFox


Sure, I know there are plenty of folks out there who eat the chips and may not even be environmental wackos. I'm sure there's even a few who advocate polluting the planet to death who may enjoy those chips. I tried them a few times and was not impressed. They were OK but, nothing to get excited about.

I'm pointing out the green hypocrisy here because, for some reason, Frito's decided to market the chips to the environmentalist demographic. You can figure that out in two seconds by reading the packaging. In the spirit of their enviro-friendly snack concept, they made a biodegradable bag to put the chips in to further their enviro-friendly image. I thought it was revealing how quickly they dumped the biodegradable bag over some silly noise complaints.

I'm actually surprised they shelled out the bucks to solve the noise problem but, I have questions about the environmental impact of adding a rubbery glue to solve the noise problem. I just wonder if that glue might cause further environmental problems down the line.

I wonder how far they'll go to maintain the enviro-friendly image of this snack. If you really enjoy the snack, you shouldn't care what its packaged in. If you only eat them because they're supposedly helping to save the environment, how can you continue to eat a snack that you may not even like just to support your principals?

I'm sorry, if someone put out a product supporting a cause I believe in but, it tasted like crap, I still wouldn't eat it. In fact, I would be offended that they were using my cause to further their crummy product.