‘Lady Doritos’? PepsiCo says no way
NEW YORK—Don’t expect to see “lady Doritos” on store shelves. The company behind the cheesy chips said Tuesday that it’s not developing a line of Doritos designed specifically for women, despite widespread online speculation that it was.
The phrase “lady Doritos” trended on social media after PepsiCo’s longtime CEO Indra Nooyi said on a podcast that unlike men, women don’t like to lick their fingers after eating a bag of Doritos.
“Women would love to do the same, but they don’t,” Nooyi said in an interview on the Freakonomics podcast. “
They don’t like to crunch too loudly in public. And they don’t lick their fingers generously and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth.”
Doritos are made by Plano, Texas-based Frito-Lay, a subsidiary of PepsiCo.
Nooyi, who has run the soda and snack company for more than a decade, later said the company is “getting ready to launch” snacks that are “designed and packaged differently” for women. “Women love to carry a snack in their purse,” Nooyi said.
But PepsiCo said the interpretation of her comments to mean that female-friendly Doritos were in the works were “inaccurate.”
“We already have Doritos for women—they’re called Doritos,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.