Today I was looking around The Wall Street Journal online and I came across this article about Frito-Lay’s biodegradable packaging for Sun Chips. The article explained how the company’s switch from the standard, polluting food packaging to biodegradable, environmentally-friendly packaging has actually caused a great decrease in Sun Chip sales in the last eight months. Apparently, the newer, clean packaging is “noisy” and annoying to consumers, so they stopped buying and switched to a substitute good.

When I first heard of the biodegradable bag, I respected PepsiCo (the company that owns Frito-Lay) for coming up with this innovative idea, and hoped that the company would set an example for others – I thought that maybe this environmentally-friendly type of packaging would eventually become the norm. But after reading this article, I was disturbed to see how easily PepsiCo succumbed to economic pressures. While I first thought that PepsiCo might actually care about the environment, at the end of the day it seems that it still cares about capital and monetary gain most above anything else.

Here’s the link to the article: Sun Chips Bag to Lose Its Crunch