NEW YORK -- Echoing her "snackification" message as keynote speaker at CSP Business Media's Restaurant Leadership Conference (RLC) in Scottsdale, Ariz., in April 2012, PepsiCo Inc. chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi said at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference this week, "As we look into the future, the lines between snacks and beverages are blurring."
She said, "I don't know if Naked Juice is a snack or a beverage. Many beverages as they get more viscous, are eating into the snacks occasion and many snacks that used to be consumed as a dry snack are now being eaten in different ways."
Nooyi said that people should think about PepsiCo's business "as being drinkable, spoonable and one-hand consumable. So, if you look at Quaker Real Medleys, it's a spoonable product, but it's also going to be a bar and it could also be a drinkable oats. So, I think increasingly you're going to find people think about the convenience occasion as one continuum. We keep talking artificially about snacks and beverages only because some people used to track this industry differently. I think that's over. This is convenience and the best way to think about it is all our products you can consume with a rip, twist, flip or tear, whether it's snacks or beverages and that's the business we're in."
And she added, "We continue to balance the portfolio of offerings to include more nutritional products. And we increased the permissibility of our social snacks and beverages by reducing calories and sodium to address the growing aging population and consumers growing concerned with health and wellness."
Purchase, N.Y.-based PepsiCo is a global food and beverage leader with net revenues of more than $65 billion and a product portfolio that includes 22 brands that generate more than $1 billion each in annual retail sales. Its main businesses are Quaker, Tropicana, Gatorade, Frito-Lay and Pepsi-Cola.
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