For no real reason, I looked at one of those FritoLay variety snack pack bundles in the grocery store yesterday. You know, the ones with 18 individual serving bags, of various assortments of chips?
If anyone cares, I picked up the ‘classic’ assortment.
Anyway, printed on the bag is the breakdown of what it contains, something like 3 Ruffles, 3 regular chips, 3 Fritos, 2 Dorito Cool Chips, 4 Cheetos, 3 Dorito regular (done from memory, probably not exact.)
BUT it also had an additional large sticker on it saying something along the lines of ‘All items included, but exact counts may vary.’ With a QR code you could scan in case you really really wanted to know how many Fritos vs. Cheetos it contained before you bought it.
Which is why I ended up buying the pack, I just was really curious what would be inside. As it turned out, the answer wasn’t very startling: instead of 3 regular chips there was only one, and we got one additional Dorito and one additional Ruffles to make up for it.
So, two questions:
Is there enough disruption in the snack chip production system they can’t be sure of having X of whichever on any given day? And if so, why would there be a shortage of regular chips but plenty of Ruffles? I mean, they’re made out of exactly the same raw materials, probably in the same factory!
Surely they wouldn’t go to all the trouble of the extra sticker unless this was an on-going problem?
Is rather silly. Does this imply that they have/or will create a variant sticker/QR code for each possible variable mix possible?? There are six varieties in the package, and the permanent printed sack promises from 2 to 4 of the various items while the sticker promises there are at least one of each. But obviously any ‘shortfall’ could be made up with a bag of any of the other varieties, or, say one each of up to three other kinds, or two of one and one of another. Not to mention what if they’re low on TWO different varieties, or three, or going to extreme, maybe this pack contains 1 each of five flavors and 13 bags of Fritos?
My head hurts. How many different stickers will they need to cover all possible variety pack assortments?
Not that I doubt you or anything, but could you explain a little? Like I sort of get where the 18! comes from – the 18 packets – but why divide by 12!?
Local store was out of mixed nuts (as was T. Joe’s, in most of their permutations). I asked and they said their main plant was having trouble getting cashews. “Probably just temporary Covid-related supply chain issues, sorry!”
So maybe this month they’re low on Ruffles, then it’ll be a week of fewer Cheetos, then the infamous Low on Doritos Week, when the riots started.
There’s two types of systems here: one where order doesn’t matter (permutations) and one where order does matter (combinations).
Frito, Doritos, Cheeto is the same in this situation, as Doritos, Cheeto, frito, so order doesn’t matter.
The equation for permutations is quite well known. n!/(n-r)! Where n is the total number of things, r is the number of things
Could be a labor problem rather than a materials problem. If a percentage of the work force is out with Covid, then they have to choose which production lines run and which are idle. That will impact the amount of each product in the warehouses available for packaging into Variety Packs. Monday they run Cheetos, for example. Tuesday Ruffles. All the while the biggest selling item(s) run every day. A schedule like that will set “uniformity” on puree and it’s sticker time.
It could also be a demand side issue. Maybe for some reason, right now, when people are buying the non-variety packages, they’re buying more of the regular and less of the Ruffles. But they’re still making the same amount of each, so they’re offloading the excess Ruffles by overrepresenting them in the variety packs.
My guess is that they use the ‘variety packs’ as a form of inventory management. If they have too many of one flavor because they screwed up estimates for demand, they’d get rid of them by adding more to the variety pack and removing some other flavor in shorter supply.
The QR code is probably generated by a printer on the line after the bags have been added to the big bag, and automatically pasted on the bag. That couod be useful for other processes in and out of the factory.
By the way, those packs in Canada have fixed amounts, always the same. But there are lots of variety bags with different combinations.
They were fixed quantities here too until a little more than a year ago. There have been shocks to the food manufacturing supply chain and shortages of various ingredients occur more than they have at any time in my experience with this industry (over 35 years).
Have you checked that the big bags are actually the same in Canada now or do they have stickers there? The Canadian supply chain for CPG food is surprisingly separate from the US one.