Why can you buy lasagna-flavored snacks in Thailand and not in Italy?Which country can tolerate peppers? And why do Germans like paprika so much?
Reuben and Peggy’s tasks aren’t the most sensible secret as they usually are. They don’t have guns, for example, and the grey conference table they sit at is pretty much the same as that found in any UK workplace. They even have LinkedIn profiles that indicate the titles of their tasks. But here’s where things get weird: look up the call from the company they paint for (a call I agreed not to print) and locate little information about Reuben and Peggy’s paintings. You can click through to each and every page of your company’s online page and walk away without knowing that you create the world’s most beloved crunchy flavors.
Reuben and Peggy are not their real names. Reuben is a snacks development manager and Peggy is a marketer, and they work for a “seasoning house”, a company that manufactures flavourings for crisps.
I meet with the couple on Zoom in the hopes that they can answer a question I’ve been worrying about for years. In January 2019, while visiting Thailand, I came across a pink Walkers packet with layered pasta, tomato sauce and cheese pictured. on the front. Lasagna flavor, the package said. You can’t buy Walkers (or Lay’s, as they are called in most countries around the world) in Italy. Relatively speaking, Italians have a small variety of Lay’s: paprika, bacon, barbecue, savory, and Ricetta Campagnola, a “country recipe. ” flavor made with tomato, paprika, parsley and onion. I’ve enjoyed Hawaiian-style Poké Bowl chips in Hungary and chocolate-covered potato bites in Finland; I stayed away from the Pringles with sweet mayo cheese in South Korea. So why can you get lasagna-flavored Lay’s lasagna in Thailand but not in Italy, the dish’s country of origin? Who determines which country gets which fries?
Walkers began producing products in Britain in 1948; it was acquired through the American chip company Frito-Lay in 1989, and today, the Lays are available in more than two hundred countries, from Argentina to Vietnam. Some types require little explanation: Poutine Lay is only available in Canada because fries dipped in gravy are Brazil’s national dish. However, the fresh produce aisles of the world are full of mysteries. Why do Norwegians enjoy Pringles with salt and pepper and oven-roasted poultry Doritos can only be eaten in Korea?Why does Europe like paprika so much?? Pringles, like Lay’s, is rarely even a century old, but its hits can be found in 80 countries. Both brands have taken the world by storm. With billions behind them, do they really know unspeakable secrets about our national tastes and temperaments?
Peggy says that to understand why, for example, paprika fries proliferate on German shelves, you have to understand the history of immigration. But I hear its secrets at the end of my journey. First I’m going to Leicester.
For more than 75 years, Leicester has been the place where British potatoes become crisps. Its Walkers factory produces 5m packets a day, steam billowing from behind big blue security gates. Just down the road sits its HQ, where 300 marketers, scientists and chefs decide which crisps the world needs next.
Emma Wood controls most of the world outside the US – at least when it comes to the taste of crisps. In 2017 – 12 years after she started working for Walkers’ parent company, PepsiCo – she was promoted to director of global flavour and seasonings, meaning it’s her job to develop flavours for Europe, Africa and Asia. It’s not a responsibility she takes lightly. “I know it’s not an expensive purchase,” she says over a conference table, multipacks of Wotsits lying between us, “but it’s really disappointing when you buy something for your lunch and it’s not what you wanted it to be.”
In fact, not everyone eats chips for lunch: in France and in southern Europe they are used as an appetizer and appetizer. That’s why the Lay’s in the area are so soft and simple; That’s why there’s a Mediterranean flavor that’s necessarily made up only of oil and salt (so that it doesn’t overpower the look of the cocktails). And that’s why innovating in Spain means providing new thicknesses and not new flavours.
Wood’s favourite flavour is salt and vinegar, but I think her personality is more prawn cocktail – sweet but punchy with her blond bob, floaty floral skirt and silver-studded trainers. In the past two decades, her work has taken her everywhere. Before Doritos launched in India five years ago, she took a “culinary trek” across the northern city of Lucknow, trying different pilaus, meats and breads from street food stalls. She relies on knowledge from local PepsiCo teams, so that if she says, “I think I can taste cardamom,” they can clarify: “It’s roasted green cardamom, actually.”
Doritos were introduced to India with the same cheese and chili flavors we have in Britain, but a few years later, Masala Mayhem was introduced to the region. Why does it take up to seven years to launch a chip?
It begins, like everything now, on computers. Director of global progression, Tom Wade, says PepsiCo uses a tool that “swallows” each and every restaurant menu on the internet. “You look at what ingredients start to appear; We see the number of restaurants in Europe that use smoked paprika, the presence of black salt in restaurants in this or that region,” he says.
That’s why Walkers introduced Thai Sweet Chilli Sensations to the UK in 2002. “This inflection point into the mainstream is very vital to opting for a vital flavor,” Wade says. Crisp’s releases can serve as a rough timeline of immigration trends: only 4 Thai restaurants opened in the UK in the 1970s, but as of 2003 there were 446. Today, Thai Sweet Chilli is one of the best-selling Walkers flavours in the UK.
Once the computers have done their job, the data makes its way to Wood. If she’s lucky, she can repurpose an existing flavour. In 2010, Lay’s launched Patatje Joppie in the Netherlands because of the nation’s love of Joppiesaus, a curried mayonnaise. Wood says the same flavour exists as Honey Mustard in other parts of the world. “We can play with the naming, because what you call something has a really big bearing on what people think it is.”
When a flavour is made from scratch, Wood goes to chef Pat Clifford, who spent 14 years in restaurants – including some with two Michelin stars – before moving into “ambient foods” (anything in the supermarket that isn’t chilled). Clifford’s “creative design kitchen” is clean and clinical. Bald, tall, bespectacled and wearing one smartwatch on each wrist, Clifford has a matter-of-fact way of speaking that brings to mind a crushed peppercorn crisp.
The chef fries some pointed peppers to demonstrate how he developed a flavour that was released in Spain in 2022. Despite traditionally being less adventurous with crisps, Spanish appetites have changed recently thanks to younger generations being exposed to different crisps on their travels (and on the internet). So Clifford collaborated with a TV chef to recreate some traditional dishes. “I went to work with Quique Dacosta in his restaurant in Spain. He showed me how he made this dish,” he says. The peppers are fried in charcoal-infused oil to give them a smoky flavour. The sharpness of the pepper cuts through in the real dish and the roasted wood-fired pepper with olive oil and garlic crisps.
PepsiCo works with local chefs to perceive the nuances of other cuisines. Prior to the launch of Lay’s in Pakistan in 2007, the team studied the country’s “culinary worldview. “”What I’ve found incredibly appealing is that in Pakistani cuisine there’s an expectation that ‘all flavors will be accompanied with the right spices,'” Wade says. A crunchy tomato won’t taste like a tomato, and a crunchy cheese won’t taste like cheese if it’s not paired with the “right spice mix. “email when asked what those spices are, but there are clues on their packages. The Swiss roasted cheese Lay’s you can get in Pakistan, for example, have peppercorns and chili peppers in the photo on the front. Tango Lay’s Spanish Tomato Lay’s in India have photos of chili oil and cinnamon sticks. Even when consumers crave a taste of the world, French fries satisfy the local appetite.
It turns out that there is some other step in the procedure to create a new flavor. With my mouth full of pepper in Clifford’s kitchen, I ask, “But how do you do it?”How to turn this dish into powder? That’s when I found out that’s not the case. “We collaborate with these big global flavor and condiment houses,” Wood says, without naming names. When I search for a house and Google “homemade seasoning,” all that pops up is the name of a 2013 British horror movie about an orphan who murders soldiers.
I’ve heard about condiment houses in Mechelen, Belgium, known as the city of lunar fire extinguishers. Its citizens earned the nickname Maneblussers in 1687 after making plans to throw buckets of water into the cathedral, believing it to be on fire. In fact, the red glow of the moon shone through their windows.
Just a 15-minute drive from the cathedral is a 27-year-old Pringles factory that smells like a potato chip shop. It runs all day, every day, even at Christmas, and produces 100,000 tons of Pringles a year. A third of its production is destined for the United Kingdom. “We only close the line when necessary,” says plant manager Johan Van Batenburg in a promotional video with a spectacular soundtrack.
There are six lines in the factory; The paprika line is covered with a thin layer of orange powder. I watch a pasta-smelling rolled dough being cut into the iconic Pringles shape, the hyperbolic paraboloid. The French fries are fried in a device so hot that moisture is perceived in the air. . They move so temporarily under a cascade of seasonings that they become a blur. Most chips here are seasoned with original flavors or sour cream and onion, the two making the most sense “in almost every market,” with the exception of Russia, where Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Pringles saw to the two countries as a single market; They only split up after Pringles decided to supply Russia in 2022.
Crisps and geopolitics go hand in pack. Before Russia was cut off, Russia was Pringles’ second biggest market, and its might meant it could make demands. This is how it ended up with speciality seasonings such as mushroom and cream, as well as parmesan with black pepper (a flavour not available to Italians). “They had the volume, so they could request special flavours because we have a minimum order quantity,” says Gert Peremans, a salty snacks research and development director at Kellanova – formerly Kellogg’s – Pringles’ parent company.
In Europe, Pringles offers 34 active flavors in seven can formats (one of which is called “David” for reasons no one can explain). Not all of those flavors are found in all European countries: the shrimp cocktail is really only sold in the U. K. and Ireland, while bacon is found in most countries except Belgium, the Netherlands, and the bastions of vegetarianism in Austria, Denmark, and Sweden. Salt and vinegar are widespread everywhere except Norway and Italy. “They’re not used to putting vinegar on their chips; they just eat them on their own with salt,” says Julie Merzougui, lead culinary designer at Kellanova. If a worker in Italy wanted to sell salt and vinegar, he would simply have to ask for it. At this time, this is not the case.
Multiple times a year, Pringles releases limited-edition flavours known internally as “insanely accurate analogues” – Merzougui and Peremans come up with these for Europe. “People think we have the dream job,” Merzougui says (she has dark hair, round glasses and an easy laugh, a personality akin to an experimental flavour – perhaps a chorizo Pringle). Peremans, who has worked at the company for 26 years, has a salt and pepper beard and a Salt & Shake personality. He speaks quietly and pragmatically, but has a subtle playful streak: “My young son, he wants to become my successor.”
Like Lay’s, Pringles starts with data: In Asia, the company uses a Tinder-like tool with two hundred consumers at a time, asking them to swipe left or right to select potential flavors. Lucia Sudjalim, lead developer at Pringles in Asia, says she “listens to social media a lot,” spotting trends among influencers and bloggers. Kellanova also uses artificial intelligence, which Merzougui says can expect trends up to 10 years in advance. Things aren’t all that sophisticated, though: Lay’s and Pringles also take a look at what’s on the shelves of the countries they want to enter, copying flavors and identifying gaps they want to fill.
Yet just because the world wants a flavour doesn’t mean it’s made. In December 2020, scotch egg sales soared in the UK after Conservative ministers ruled the snack a “substantial meal” (providing punters with an excuse to be in the pub under Covid-19 lockdown rules). Peremans was challenged to make scotch egg Pringles and pulled it off; Merzougui says they tasted “really authentic”. Ultimately, however, the potential order volume was not high enough to justify a production run. (This, incidentally, is why it’s hard to get Salt & Pepper Pringles in the UK, even though they’re delicious.)
Another never-before-seen flavor component from a collaboration with Nando’s that lost steam for reasons Peremans is rarely too sure about. Sometimes logistics get in the way: Perfectly blended condiments can clog machines or create too much dust, causing sneezing in the factory. Belgian law requires that every condiment be subjected to a dust explosion test: it is set on fire. under controlled conditions to ensure it does not explode.
Inside the factory, manager Van Batenburg shows me giant bucket-shaped bags of condiments that arrive in a position to cascade onto the fries. At the end of his video presentation, he made a passing comment that turned my world upside down. We were talking about other juicy companies, big competitors. ” Basically,” he said, “they use the same condiment houses that we do. “
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I leave Belgium with the names of 3 seasoning spaces that Pringles works with. At home, I notice that their websites are obscure: they communicate flavors and trends, but they don’t even mention Pringles. I didn’t stumble upon a conspiracy as much as I invited him, but I’m still in shock. After two months of cajoling by the Pringles team, two representatives of a seasoning space agreed to speak, though only on condition of anonymity, in accordance with their contractual obligations.
“He’s pretty reserved,” admits food scientist Reuben Zoom, dressed in a pink blouse and a considerate expression (the only crunch I can compare it to is an eighth note). “Everyone has their own crown jewels that they protect. “
As a marketer, Peggy has always found the company’s secrecy “strange”. She speaks clearly, in a way that is reminiscent of a teacher or a steadfast multigrain snack. “It’s always been a bit of a puzzle to me … I was like, ‘Why aren’t we shouting about this?’ But I was told, ‘Oh, no, we have to keep it very quiet.’”
In fact, as Van Batenburg hinted at in Belgium, the condiment space that Reuben and Peggy paint for flavoring materials for Pringles and Lay’s, as well as other brands. When his clients are asked if they know, Reuben replies, “They know and they don’t. “We just don’t communicate about it,” Peggy adds. However, that doesn’t mean a Pringle with salt and vinegar is flavored with the same seasoning as a Lay’s with salt and vinegar. This is because the condiment space is strictly divided to ensure exclusivity. Reuben’s team works on the Pringles account; the team that makes the flavors for PepsiCo is in a completely different country. ” So the recipe, so to speak, with salt and Pringles vinegar, you can’t tell through the other team,” Reuben says.
How exactly do they arrive at these formulations? How do you reduce a national dish to dust?Let’s say a visitor arrives at Reuben’s and needs a crispy tagine. First, Reuben identifies the “gold standard” tagine. Depending on the market, it’s not a question of authenticity: when a visitor asked for a katsu curry flavor, Reuben asked Wagamama because knowledge of the market told him that British consumers liked his edition of the dish.
After identifying the key ingredients, Reuben can’t just copy them into powder form. The onions in a tagine have been cooked slowly, for example, so onion powder doesn’t work. And lamb powder is no longer available: many meat fries are vegetarian. Some potato chips involve plant-based proteins that have been hydrolyzed (broken down into their components) to produce a meaty flavor. Other times, monosodium glutamate or a flavor enhancer known as “disodium 5′-ribonucleotides” is added to create an umami flavor.
A lab of “aromatic chemists” creates the aromatic compounds that Reuben mixes into seasonings. Because textures can’t be recreated in a crunchy sauce — “if you look at a tagine, it’s spicy, moist, spicy,” Reuben says. other “sensats”, compounds that cause sensations of heat, tingling, cooling or salivation. Conventional ingredients such as salt, sugar, and spices are also used.
Reuben describes his paintings as clinical and artistic, comparing an uncured Pringle to a blank canvas on which he paints. “You have your base notes, which will be your salt and your sugar,” he says. “And then you start layering them with other kinds of flavoring molecules and chemicals, or the actual flavors in liquid or encapsulated formats. ” Vinegar cannot be pulverized in liquid form; Because its flash point is lower than the boiling point of water, the flavor would evaporate when cooked on a crispy surface. Instead, vinegar crystallizes.
It may take 12 attempts for Reuben’s team with customers to achieve a precisely clever taste; Pre-launch customer feedback deserves to be taken into account. Condiment houses also deserve legal regulations: the best blend of tagine flavors can exceed the recommended amounts of salt, while EU regulations restrict the amount of cinnamon and pepper extract that can be used.
Keeping up with this scenario is tricky for Sudjalim, a Pringles product developer responsible for Australia, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. “It’s not like the EU or the U. S. ; all the other countries have other compliance requirements,” “Face-to-face interaction is especially for Japan. Because of the culture, frame language and facial expressions can be more revealing than spoken words,” she explains. She’s found that Japanese testers can tell a crisp is smart before they push the dish away, so they know how to push it to say more.
The market in Sudjalim is very varied. ” Even in Southeast Asia there are 10 countries, and between the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, they all have other taste preferences,” he says. He found that other people in Indonesia like “sweet and meaty stuff. ” Although Filipinos like this too, they like to add vinegar. Thailand loves the heat. Even a single country can be divided. In Japan, the same curry can vary from prefecture to prefecture, so one is more like a tomato, one sweeter, and the other spicier. Sudjalim considers them all to create the “optimized” Pringles curry.
We’re just as nuanced in Europe. Even something as simple as a barbecue crisp can vary dramatically, Reuben says. British people like them sweet and acidic, Germans prefer them spicier and drier, while Spaniards want a sweet, smoky flavour with less vinegar.
If you were to simplify the appearance of the world through the eyes of a potato chip, everything would be split in two, with one aspect being classified as “cheese” and the other as “fish. “The best-selling Walkers in the UK are those with cheese and onions, while in Vietnam and Thailand it’s crab and seaweed. (Reuben argues that “fish is not a snack” for most European consumers. )
The most experimental country is China, where Lay’s has introduced beer flavors and rose petal chips, as well as “sensory” lines that numb, refresh, and bubble. Wade says the experiment is driven by the country’s love of e-commerce, with grocery shopping sites incorporated into social media. “Through that, you have products that are trending and are emerging very, very quickly. “Wood, the developer of Walkers, puts it another way: “If you have 1. 4 billion people, you’re bound to like it. »
“Europe is simply not in a position to buy sugary chips,” says Merzougui, a designer at Pringles. And while other people around the world think they like highly spiced food, Mexico is the only country that does, so the chili Doritos there need to be spicier. Meanwhile, he said, “even the slightest hot spot” is too much for Russia.
Sudjalim says the Japanese love to give gifts, which means they throw souvenir Pringles there. She considers Korea to be “very adventurous”: you can find cola, caramel and yogurt flavors there. “Don’t frown. ” She insists when I react to the last one. “That’s not bad!”
Hend Kovermann, a Pringles manager who oversees 27 markets in Europe, says the Nordics are “progressive”, while central European markets are “less exposed, less international, less adventurous”. France, according to Merzougui, is “focusing more and more on health”, while Germans enjoy vegetarian flavours. “And most of all paprika. They just love a lot of paprika.” There are three different paprika Pringles in Germany – sweet, classic and grilled. Why is the flavour so beloved?
“It’s historic,” says Peggy. People who came to Germany from other parts of Europe imported their paprika from Eastern Europe and Hungary. They use it a lot in their cooking and there has been a migration to Germany. Between the end of World War II and the millennium, 20 million other people emigrated to West Germany, some of whom were Aussiedlers, Germans returning from Eastern Europe. Today, paprika is still an element of German cuisine.
Despite our differences, globalization is bringing about immediate change. While Indian consumers have traditionally sought out cinnamon in their Spanish Tango tomato chips, Sudjalim says Japanese consumers need Pringles fish.
For 23 years, Elizabeth D’Cunha has worked as a food anthropologist (or “trends application guru”) for PepsiCo. “Flavour acceptance,” she says, is now higher, “due to increased access to unique flavours from other cultures”. Much of this is driven by millennials who were exposed to global foods while young. D’Cunha didn’t try sushi until she was 14 years old. “My 14-year-old child has never not known sushi and can buy it from one of four restaurants within half a mile of our house,” she says. D’Cunha believes that as gen Z ages, we will find “more authentically flavoured snacks in mainstream shops”.
For now, authenticity is everything: in Thailand, I’ve also noticed flavours of chilli squid, grilled prawns and seafood sauce, fries that England doesn’t yet seem to be in a position for. What about lasagna? How did it get there? This is partly due to the length of supermarkets in Thailand.
“They have a lot of convenience store chains in Thailand. You’ll notice supermarkets are really small, the space is very tight,” PepsiCo’s Tom Wade explains. Therefore, Lay’s constantly swap in new limited-edition flavours, rather than lining the shelves with different varieties. “In the same way that we might find an exciting limited flavour in the UK to be Indian or Thai, something Italian is exciting and new to a Thai consumer,” Wade says.
But most importantly, expectations about the taste of lasagna are not as high for a Thai customer as they are for an Italian one. After all, there’s an explanation why we don’t eat meatloaf chips. “An Italian would think, ‘How can we flavor it?crispy from our mother’s original lasagna?'” said Wade. Peggy puts it this way: “They’d just think it’s terrible if you put something like lasagna on a chip!”