How Snacks.com Is Showing Frito-Lay What Shoppers Actually Want

Delaney, a 24-year-old woman living in Texas, hadn’t heard about Frito-Lay's direct-to-consumer platform Snacks.com until her brother’s girlfriend told her about it last Christmas. Interested, she visited the site and purchased a variety pack containing her choice of the company’s potato chips, including Lay's dill pickle, Lay's salt and vinegar and Ruffles cheddar and sour cream. “I always hate the variety bags you can buy at the grocery store because it's full of ones you don't like, so I was super excited,” said Delaney, who requested Adweek not publish her last name. After the package arrived in early January, Delaney posted a video about it on TikTok to her then 2,000 followers. The 60-second clip went viral, attracting more than a million views. In a follow-up video posted on the same day, Delaney explained if people want to build their own bundle of Doritos, Cheetos and Fritos, they should visit Snacks.com/varietypack. And they did. Traffic surged. Others tweeted about the newfound ability to assemble their own selection of Frito-Lay snacks, owned by PepsiCo. All the excitement helped make Snacks.com the #1 search result for “snacks” on Google at the time, according to Frito-Lay, driving even more traffic. Orders quickly overwhelmed the site, as demand exceeded the company's supply of boxes. "It basically blew us out of the water and taught us a lot about what you have to do to be in a direct-to-consumer business," Michael Lindsey, chief growth officer for PepsiCo Foods North America, told Adweek. https://www.tiktok.com/@sunbeambaby/video/6914389559589522694?lang=en&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1 Just over a year ago, Frito-Lay created Snacks.com in about 30 days to meet the rise in people shopping online during the pandemic. More important than some additional income, however, the central aim was to gather data and insights not available through traditional retail partnerships or third-party market research. Thanks in part to Delaney’s TikTok video, which took her about half an hour to make in her bedroom, the company has received exactly that. “There is no substitute for having a firsthand relationship with a consumer who's purchasing directly from you and telling you exactly what they want to buy,” said Lindsey, who noted Frito-Lay is likely to sell more products through a single Walmart location than Snacks.com. Learning lessons The website, which features more than 200 SKUs, has been great for selling limited-edition merchandise, testing new flavors and gauging product interest based on what people type in the search bar. Snacks.com, for instance, has resurrected Fritos' barbecue-flavored corn chips, which the company previously pulled from shelves. "It's one of those beloved products that we perhaps killed too soon," Lindsey said. One complaint about Frito-Lay's conventional in-store multipacks, Lindsey explained, is they always contain some brand nobody wants. The item in question—whether it's a certain flavor of Funyuns or something else—differs from family to family, he added. The option for shoppers to build their own variety pack, which debuted on Snacks.com in select states in late 2020, has been both highly popular among consumers and educational for Frito-Lay. Shoppers have been mixing and matching products in ways the company didn't expect, such as pairing healthier options with more indulgent ones or buying for households with parents who have radically different tastes than their teenage children. "I'll be honest, we haven't thought about doing that at retail before," said Lindsey, adding the information might influence how Frito-Lay approaches its in-store multipacks in the future. Figures from the market intelligence company Similarweb show Snacks.com received nearly 1.5 million visits in January—much more than the typical month. "At the moment, Snacks.com traffic is up 88% from when the site launched, with 30% of all traffic going to the variety pack page," Alisha Kapur, a senior manager at Similarweb, told Adweek. Frito-Lay's make-your-own variety pack offering was a limited 12-week test that ended in the middle of January. With the service down while attention on it was red hot, the company offered to notify shoppers when it was up and running again. More than 50,000 people joined the mailing list. Since returning nationwide in late March, the option has expanded from 20 items-per-box to 30 to allow for more variety. According to Frito-Lay, that's what people wanted. Jess Zafarris contributed reporting for this story. Costco’s Free Samples Are Returning, Even Though Samplers May Not