Frito-Lay unveils quieter SunChips bag

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Frito-Lay hopes its new SunChips bag will please consumers who complained in droves last year when the company rolled out a “green” bag that could be tossed into the compost bin.

Snackers said the new bag was simply too noisy and detracted from the chip-eating experience. (Translation: In other words, it drowned out the TV and was harder to keep late-night secret chip eating a secret.)

There were so many complaints that the company yanked most of the bags off the market.

Then Frito-Lay scientists began to tackle the bag construction problem.

They had to find a way to quiet the deafening noise created by the wrinkling of two completely different bags sealed together -- the razor-thin bag that protects the food on the inside and the bag on the outside that carries the labeling. Enter rubber.

A rubber-like adhesive sealing the two parts of the bag together acted like a noise dampening agent. The new bags are arriving in stores now, but only on the plain-flavored chips. We’ll have to wait and see whether they new bags have more compostability than the old ones.

So, what do you think? Are you eager to give the bags a test drive?

Personally, I didn’t have a problem with the noise of the “green” bags (but they were considerably noisier), but I had a hard time opening them. And who wants to feel like they’re too weak to open a bag of chips? Talk about detracting from the chip-eating experience.

-- Rene Lynch
Twitter / renelynch