Lay’s Named Fifth Largest Global FMCG Brand in 2018

Kantar has released its seventh annual edition of Brand Footprint which outlines brands that were able to respond to challenges with agility and continued to post growth. Since the report was first published in 2013, Kantar has built up a comprehensive picture of the choices made by global consumers, dissecting the performance of thousands of brands in order to help them grow both now and into the future.

The report revealed that Frito-Lay’s flagship brand Lay’s had a global penetration of 29.6% and was the fifth most chosen fast-moving-consumer-goods (FMCG) brand in the world last year. Research from Kantar shows that Lay’s chips were chosen 2.24bn times, on average 6.6 times a year.

Lay’s performance in the year that passed was driven by strong out-of-home (OOH) sales. As Kantar notes, for snacking foods and non-alcoholic, a large percentage of purchases are made for OOH consumption, which accounts for 41% of all spent for these two sectors across nine global markets.

In 2018, Lay’s saw strong OOH CRP growth (+5%), turning what would have been flat performance overall not growth. Kantar says that for brands in these categories, winning OOH is not just nice-to-have, it is a must. CRP stands for Consumer Reach Point and is metric used by Kantar to measure how many households around the world are buying a brand (its penetration) and how often (the number of times shoppers have acquired the brand).

To achieve this, Frito-Lay has mastered the adaptation to local flavors. Another driving force is that the brand enjoys good distribution. The chips widely available across the globe, even in rural areas and small villages.