Frito-Lay

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Frito-Lay is an American company that is now part of the PepsiCo group. It was formed in 1961 by a merger of The Frito Company and H.W. Lay & Company. These were two companies that were founded in parallel as early as 1932. The Frito Company was founded in 1932 by Charles Elmer (C.E.) Doolin in San Antonio, Texas, and initially focused on corn chips. In the 22 years until his death in 1959, Doolin developed it into a successful company that had annual sales of $50 million with manufacturing locations in 18 cities and more than 3,000 employees. Also in 1932, Herman Warden Lay founded a potato chip company in Nashville, Tennessee, which became H.W. Lay & Company after a move to Atlanta in 1939. Lay also expanded with his company and by 1956 had manufacturing locations in 8 cities, as well as branches and warehouses in 13 other cities, at which he employed a total of over 1000 people. In 1944, H.W. Lay & Company became the first snack manufacturer to advertise its Lay's products in a television commercial.

Cooperation between the two companies began as early as 1945, when the Frito Company granted H.W. Lay & Company an exclusive franchise for the production and distribution of Frito products in the southwestern United States. This cooperation eventually resulted in a merger of the two companies in September 1961, which created Frito-Lay Inc. Together, the companies achieved annual sales of $127 million in 1961 after the merger to form Frito-Lay Inc.

In February 1965, Frito-Lay Inc. and Pepsi-Cola announced plans to merge, which were completed on June 8 of the same year. This merger resulted in PepsiCo Inc. On the list of the world's most valuable brands, published annually by the American business magazine Forbes, Frito-Lay was ranked 39th in 2020 with a brand value of US$16.3 billion.

In 1996, the PepsiCo Group restructured its snack division and brought all domestic and international operations in this business unit under one umbrella, the Frito-Lay Company, divided into the operating units Frito-Lay North America and Frito-Lay International. Frito-Lay North America now generates about 50% of PepsiCo's annual profits.

Frito-Lay's products have only been on the German market since 2000, after Frito-Lay expanded its international business activities, particularly in Europe and Australia, from 1998 onwards.