Marketing - Written by William Hobson on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 14:36 - 0 Comments
PepsiCo aims to be healthier by 2015
A 10 year strategy to make all of PepsiCo UK’s range of food and drink healthier has been been unveiled.
Set out in the company’s inaugural Health Report, the plan is a timely piece of marketing. News related to snack products has for some time been peppered with criticism from advocacy groups and regulators concerned over rising obesity levels and the problems of unhealthy eating.
Making a healthier product will shield PepsiCo – as the owner of Walkers is perhaps the country’s biggest producer of savoury snacks – from some of this criticism as well as driving appeal towards a more ‘health conscious’ demographic. Already the company has fulfilled, in the UK market at least, a pledge to cut the levels of salt, fat and sugar in its products. It aims to repeat this in other markets by 2015.
The Health Report details the companies plans to improve their £1.5 range of products, which includes brands such as Pepsi, Walkers, Tropicana, Quaker and Copella, by focusing research and development on products with positive nutrition.
The Walkers brand is likely to see the most change due to the Health Report. This has set a target for 2015 of increasing the percentage of PepsiCo UK savoury snacks that are baked or ‘include positive nutrition’ (such as fruit, vegetables, wholegrain or fibre) from 10% to 50%. The company also plans to place a ‘cap’ of 160 calories on each of its single serve packages of savoury snacks.
PepsiCo UK’s wide range of soft-drinks will also be altered; the company aims to account for 65% of its carbonated soft-drinks sales to be accounted for by sugar free variants. This will be in part achieved by the company’s plans, announced last month, to roll out 600ml bottles of ‘no sugar’ variants for the same price as 500ml bottles.
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