By Sharanya Gopinathan
Ladies! Have you ever felt the burning need for a snack tailored to your lady mouth and feminine sensibilities? No, never, not even for one second of your life? That’s okay, Doritos is going to give you one anyway.
Doritos, owned by PepsiCo, has decided to launch a lady-friendly version of their famous, enthusiastically flavoured corn chip. It’s suitability for ladies is defined by the fact that it won’t crunch as loudly as regular (AKA male) Doritos, and apparently will also not inspire the consumer to lick their fingers. The lady Doritos will also come in an aerodynamic packet that can fit easily into a lady’s handbag.
No, we’re not making any of this up.
PepsiCo’s global chief exec Indra Nooyi told Freakonomics Radio: “Although women would love to crunch [chips] loudly, lick their fingers and pour crumbs from the bag into their mouth afterwards, they prefer not to do this in public. You watch a lot of the young guys eat the chips, they love their Doritos, and they lick their fingers with great glee, and when they reach the bottom of the bag they pour the little broken pieces into their mouth, because they don’t want to lose that taste of the flavor, and the broken chips in the bottom. Women would love to do the same, but they don’t. They don’t like to crunch too loudly in public. And they don’t lick their fingers.”
She continues ominously, “It’s not a male and female as much as ‘are there snacks for women that can be designed and packaged differently?’ And yes, we are looking at it, and we’re getting ready to launch a bunch of them soon.”
But Ms. Nooyi, if there’s anything that this weird Dorito plan proves, it’s that we needn’t really do everything we can do. I mean, yes, we can package and design snacks for men and women differently, but what is the point of falling into tired old gender stereotypes, of women not wanting to crunch loudly in public for reasons of propriety and demureness, just to see if you can do it? But then again, ‘if we can we must’ does seem to be the slogan of the evolution of American snack food.
In other thoughts, why not design chips for everybody that don’t require the licking of fingers later? I mean, germs don’t see gender, and licking your fingers instead of washing or wiping is pretty disgusting no matter who’s doing it. If it takes altering the fabric of Doritos to teach finger-licking men to stop doing it, why not?