Organic Doritos Are A Thing, But Would Whole Foods Sell Them?

PepsiCo, the snack corporation that has brought us simple culinary delights such as Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Doritos Locos Tacos flavored Doritos, has a new product line geared to current consumers’ tastes. The Simply line is organic versions of 11 of the company’s main chip brands, including Lay’s, Cheetos, Doritos, and Tostitos.

Bloomberg News reports (warning: auto-play video at that link) that the products are now in stores, including the grocery section of Amazon.com. That leads to an interesting question: Now that Amazon owns Whole Foods, a company with famously strict rules about what products it will carry, would Frito-Lay products from the organic line ever appear on the shelves of Whole Foods?

Better-for-you brands from Big Food

The new products meet all of the requirements that Whole Foods has for its food suppliers, and are made from certified organic ingredients. Unless the chain has some kind of philosophical opposition to PepsiCo itself, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t be for sale there.

“Amazon’s acquisition makes it much more likely that Whole Foods will carry these better-for-you brands, even if they’re made by large incumbent [consumer packaged goods] players,” a research analyst who follows snack companies told Bloomberg News. “The smaller brands just can’t keep up with the spending and velocity required from Amazon anymore.”

Either smaller brands and the companies that make private label items for Whole Foods will have to keep up, or the big players will start to appear on the store and virtual shelves.

Who would even buy that?

Are there customers out there who want both the Doritos brand and a guarantee that their food was grown without synthetic pesticides and genetic modification? Sure, the chief marketing officer at Frito-Lay says.

“The notion of clean and simple is very important to a segment of consumers,” she told Bloomberg in an interview. There are customers who want “simple” ingredients but who also like a salty, flavored corn chip made from non-GMO corn.

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist