Sunchips -The world’s first 100% compostable Snack chip bag

Guest post by Helmi Ansari, Frito Lay (Canada)

In April 2010 Frito Lay Canada will introduce the world’s first 100% compostable snack chip bag on its line of multigrain Sunchips. This launch will be done simultaneously in the USA and Canada, and we will begin with the large bag sizes of Sunchips, a popular multigrain snack.



Many questions come to mind when looking at this innovation. Here are some of them with my thoughts:

1. What was the customer need that this innovation addresses?
Awareness around Environmental Sustainability in North America continues to grow, with brands pushing to demonstrate new product features and benefits to win consumer preference. In almost any category, you will find a "better for the planet" alternative to the mainstream products. While those, at least in North America, are still somewhat niche, they are becoming more popular as they achieve price and performance parity to the leading volume products, and as consumer awareness increasingly translates into purchase intent.
In the snack food industry, Frito Lay being the North American (and worldwide) market leader has an opportunity to demonstrate its Sustainability commitments and leadership in another arena – packaging. Therefore, after 4 years of innovation and high levels of investment, Frito Lay is now launching the world's first 100% compostable snack chip bag on its line of Sunchips Multigrain snack chips. This has been developed by Frito Lay which has filed several patents for this technology and material.

2. What is the communication plan around this innovation?
A comprehensive marketing campaign is being launched in 2010 in Canada and the United States to create awareness of this innovative packaging, its benefits, the field of composting, and sustainability in general as well. Included in it are innovative recycled/recyclable inserts in magazines, a web/tv campaign, and a partnership with a popular Canadian TV show called the Dragon’s Den. In this show Inventors come to pitch their idea’s to Venture capitalists to gain investments. Sunchips will be sponsoring a show on Dragon’s den that will be called “Greenvention”, inviting Canadian’s to bring their Sustainability ideas and inventions in front of the panel for judging. Sunchips will award the leading idea a grant of $100,000 and the idea will still be eligible for Venture funding from the investors as well. The World first compostable bag: This is our Greenvention, whats your’s?

3. Is this new innovation convenient to the consumer?
Absolutely. Since it is 100% compostable and BPI certified, it has the ability to break down completely into humus in a hot active compost pile. Sunchips has partnered with the Compost Council of Canada to introduce it to all Canadian Municipal composting facilities and we will be testing it at several facilities in the near future to demonstrate its properties within their various systems. Since Canada does not have a national compostability standard today facilities are selective around what they accept into their streams specific to the design of their systems. With continues education, testing, communication, a very high level of acceptability is expected for this packaging and its future variations.

4. What is the cost to the company, and to consumers for this new innovation?
The investment in R&D, and in the current packaging material are extremely high, in the many millions of dollars. It is difficult for an emerging technology like this to compete with an established high volume supply chain of traditional fossil fuel based packaging on the basis of price, and to some degree performance as well. But as with any emerging innovation, the rate of development is much higher than that with more established technologies, and we expect the cost of this technology to drop drastically in the next 2-5 years, and the performance to continue to improve rapidly as well. The material today costs over 10 times as much as traditional packaging to produce.
Will the customer pay that much more for it? That’s a key question to answer. Our perspective is that for impulse convenience products such as these, where price points are and should remain relatively low, consumers should not have to make the trade off to pay more for such products. The features should act as another point of differentiation and superiority, and be a factor to gain preference at the “moment of truth” when consumers decide to pick a product up on shelf. Sunchips will not be raising the sticker price of the bag to pay for the investments in the material, but will reduce the weight of chips in the bag by about 6% to partly offset the ongoing cost of the materials.

5. What are the key benefits of this packaging?
The key benefits are:
- We expect a 30% reduction in Carbon footprint as the manufacturing scale grows. It is already at par or better than the alternative on a very small scale.
- It comes from renewable materials reducing the need for exhausting fossil fuels
- It is compostable producing no waste footprint when disposed of properly.
- It will create increased awareness around waste reduction and packaging sustainability on shelf with the high visibility and consumer interaction that it will have in the near future.

6. What else is Frito Lay working on for the future?
We are continuing to develop future iterations of this radical packaging innovation to enhance its properties and performance. The rate of breakthroughs and innovation for us is only growing, and I can foresee a time when future versions off this material may surpass existing materials in terms of cost and performance.
In addition the transformations to our supply chain to create a new sustainable model that began over 10 years ago are continuing to accelerate as well. We are building a large Near-Net-Zero manufacturing plant in the United States in 2010/2011, making Sunchips with solar power in California, and building the Greenest fleet with new Zero emissions all electric and highly efficient conventional delivery vehicles as well. And we are continuing to win the highest accolades in industry in Canada and the United States as we go.