Quality Snacks

Quality Snacks

Quality Snacks Assembled there in a fifth-floor conference room at the North American headquarters in Plano were twelve of Frito-Lay’s finest minds. No, we weren’t the very top of the org chart—though Helen was VP for Consumer Strategy, Insights, and Growth—but we represented a crucial creative force. I believed a company was driven by its products. Period. As a senior project scientist for the Doritos platform, I had devoted my entire professional career to creating quality snacks. I had also been falling in love with Helen for about a year, ever since she joined us after a divorce followed by a management shakeout at Procter & Gamble. Her meeting style was as crisp as her business suits. She sported the short hair and large lapels of a Carly Fiorina, HP’s ceiling-busting ex-CEO, though I thought she was ten times as attractive, with balls of steel. ShecalledthemeetingtoorderandaskedforreportsonNacho Cheesier, Guacamole, and Four Cheese. Nacho was doing fine, but after Cynthia from Accounting did units of 4C and Guac by region, quality snacks / 84 there was a sort of sad silence in the room. Nacho Cheesier, of course, was simply a new and improved version of our flagship product, but where was new growth going to come from to meet theaggressivetargetsof NancySargent,presidentof Frito-LayNorth America? “Thank you, Cynthia,” Helen finally said. Then her eyes took in the rest of us. “People, that’s what’s in the rearview mirror. Call it roadkill, call it a good effort, I don’t really care. The question is, where are we headed?” Eyes lost themselves in the polished oak table. Someone had done a marvelous wax job; it was like looking into a clear shallow pond. “I say we fire the bastards on the Guac and 4C teams,” I tossed in. This prompted spotty laughter, some of it nervous, especially from two of the newbie engineers who were clearly unsettled by the failure of their first major product launches. Without my track record—I cut my buds on Taco, which in my mind will always be our flagship flavor—they couldn’t afford the joke like I could. “No, seriously,” I said. “Let me throw some corn paste at the wall and see what sticks.” My impressive title aside, I was essentially a baker, and at a less enlightened company, I would have already been put in my place: Leave the big strategic decisions to us, Reggie. But on our product development team, there were only ideas, not the people who spoke them. “If we want,” I continued, “we can say the angle was right, the flavoring was wrong, for which I take full responsibility, but I think we’re finding that we’ve pretty much exhausted all the readily exploitable Tex-Mex flavors. We can keep going down that road, to massage Helen’s metaphor,”—I turned beet red after I Quality Snacks / 85 said this—“and maybe we’ll hit the jackpot with a chili and lime or something like that, but I think we’ve got to make a leap.” TherewasadeepsighfromJaniceHoward,ourombudsperson for cultural sensitivity. She’d been hired in the midseventies, not long after the company finally capitulated in the controversy over the Frito Bandito, and was credited with thereafter keeping FL’s nose clean of any gender or race discrimination catastrophes. She operated in some amorphous management area between Legal and Human Resources, and always seemed to committee above and beyond her rank. Though she wasn’t an obvious candidate, she’d applied for the position Helen landed. Perhaps Janice was being keptinthelooptoappeaseher—wordwasthatshewasconsidering a weight discrimination suit against the company. Janice, known to be a not infrequent consumer of FL products, was pushing three hundredpounds,whileHelen,afewinchestallerataboutfive-eight, couldn’t have been more than one-forty. “I don’t know if we can afford another one of your leaps, Reggie ,” Janice said. I didn’t know exactly what she meant by this, but if she was implying that either 4C or Guac had been my idea, she was dead wrong. With those decisions, like a good soldier, like a man in charge of turning a flavoring idea into a reality that could be sprayed on actual triangular chips, I had just said: “We’ll do our best.” And we had. Sure, maybe 4C ended up “a cacophony rather than a blend,” as one consumer who called the 800...