Last March, Frito-Lay introduced a compostable chip bag. Now it's being pulled. The unexpected problem? It was way too loud.
"Clearly, we'd received consumer feedback that it was noisy," says Aurora Gonzalez, a Frito-Lay spokeswoman. "We recognized from the beginning that the bag felt, looked and sounded different."
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In this amusing Vimeo video, a citizen scientist uses a decibel meter to test exactly how loud the bag is (95 decibels) and concludes it's louder than a jet cockpit and might cause hearing damage. There's even a Facebook group called "Sorry, But I Can't Hear You Over This Sun Chips Bag" with 44,000 members.
So why were these bags so loud? Maggie Koerth-Baker provides scientific details:
Created from a polymer material based on corn starch, the bags were cursed with a high glass transition temperature. Basically, all polymers have a rubbery state and a stiff state, and each type of polymer switches from floppy to crunchy at a different temperature. For the Sun Chips bags, that was, unfortunately, around normal room temp—so what was supposed to be flexible was constantly turning brittle. And loud.
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But here's the good news:
This flaw isn't inherent to compostable chip bags. Boulder Canyon potato chips makes their version from a wood pulp polymer, which seems to avoid the problem.
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It's too bad this experiment didn't work, but Frito-Lay certainly deserves credit for trying.
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